title: Amazon Web Services : What Solutions for .Net Grid Computing on an EC2 Cloud?
body: <p>The needs of my company are quite simple : We have a multi-threaded .Net computing program that reads many Gb of binary files, processes massive calculations, and stores the results into an SQL Server Database. We would like to do this on cloud to perform this recurrent task in the shortest time possible. <br>So we are right into the cloud/grid/cluster computing thing.</p>
  
  <p>I thought there would be tons of resources on the subject and plenty of available alternatives. I was simply stunned to figure out how wrong I was.
  While mounting/running EC2 instances was a breeze, finding a relatively simple and straightforward way to parallelize and aggregate the processing power of these EC2 instances was not easy. Amazon customer service keeps dodging around and I was simply unable to get a concrete answer from them.</p>
  
  <p>I found <a href="http://www.utilify.com/products" rel="nofollow">utilify</a> which sounds promising. It is developed by the <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/alchemi/" rel="nofollow">alchemi</a> people.
  However, the <a href="http://www.utilify.com/docs/" rel="nofollow">documentation link</a> is broken and I had no answer to my emails when I contacted support so this was not very reassuring.</p>
  
  <p>We have chosen Amazon over Azure as AMI's are straight seamless VM's (no need to "bundle" the app or other) and because EBS is a more convenient storage as it is a "real" filesystem. On the other hand, Azure seems HPC ready for windows, whereas AWS offers that for Linux powered AMI's only.</p>
  
  <p>Any help and propositions are more than welcome</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT :</strong> <br>
  The .Net application is multi-threaded and consist of hundreds of parallel workers doing exactly the same task asynchronously.</p>