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PiCloud : Cloud Computing. Simplified.

picloud.com

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Re: PiCloud : Cloud Computing. Simplified.

#13
post #9
post #4

How they scale automatically on python (a non-functional language)? I am puzzled.

Python is a functional language in the sense that it has first class functions and you can pass them around.

Yes but it's not purely functional in that you cannot automagically make a script scale to n threads, as is the case with Haskell. This is what the OP is referring to.

Re: PiCloud : Cloud Computing. Simplified.

#17
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, seems like a single cloud.call will not give you any parallelism, you need many calls. So the whole parallelization challenge is left completely up to you. Still, this is a nice approach, and I'd like to see more companies in this space.

Agreed, a very cool idea. I believe you are right on the parallelism front, cloud.call just offloads the processing on their servers, but you'd have to call it multiple times to get any parallelism.

PiCloud dev here.

That is correct. We also offer a mapping function, cloud.map(func, arg_list), where every func(arg_list[i]) will be evaluated in parallel.

Re: PiCloud : Cloud Computing. Simplified.

#18
post #13
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python is a functional language in the sense that it has first class functions and you can pass them around.

Yes but it's not purely functional in that you cannot automagically make a script scale to n threads, as is the case with Haskell. This is what the OP is referring to.

Correct. cloud.call, etc. are all higher-level functions.

PiCloud does treat cloud.call(func) dispatches as completely functional. The function evaluated cannot have side-effects in terms of the program space; within the program, you access its output via cloud.result(). (Note: You can within the func have external side-effects - e.g. opening a connection to a database and modifying entries).

Re: PiCloud : Cloud Computing. Simplified.

#19
post #15

If you're familiar with Python, this is essentially outsourcing the Processing module.

Aa well as providing a transparent computing platform. This is a much better alternative for my batch processing than keeping my laptop on overnight.

You would still need to keep your laptop on as you wait for your function call to return.
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