Live data from Hacker News

PiCloud : Cloud Computing. Simplified.

picloud.com

31–40 of 43 posts

Re: PiCloud : Cloud Computing. Simplified.

#31
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

- edit : nevermind, found the answer in the 'pitfalls' doc : yes you can create picloud call from within picloud, but they of course go against your maximum count of parallel calls -

Hi

I have read (quickly) your webscraper example and i still have one question : Is it possible to launch piclouds jobs from within a picloud job ? i.e. from picloud download some list of url as csvs and then start webcrapers then have the original function return the results of these scrapers ? Thanks for your answer.

Re: PiCloud : Cloud Computing. Simplified.

#34
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who needs namespaces when you have a 'quick reference'? http://php.net/quickref.php

All programming languages should have a quick reference page exactly like this. It would make learning and working with them so much easier.

A lot of them do, except you can't just call the functions, you usually have to import the right thing and then instantiate the right object first. The reason why this works so well is also one of the limitations of PHP.

Re: PiCloud : Cloud Computing. Simplified.

#35
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how's that namespace working out for you?

Who needs namespaces when you have a 'quick reference'? http://php.net/quickref.php

yay for the index! lol. (ahh i shouldn't post this)

http://docs.python.org/genindex-all.html

Re: PiCloud : Cloud Computing. Simplified.

#36
in the documentation it is written "While the cloud module works well as a drop-in solution for pure python code, it doesn’t handle python extensions written in C/C++. If you use custom Python extensions that PiCloud does not have installed, you’ll need to upload them to PiCloud."

As I am not an advanced user of python, I find this sentence ambiguous : If I want to use PIL or the GFX from swftools.org (I need pdf to png rendering and image manipulation), they are written in C / C++. And I think they are Python extensions ?

- So can I upload them ?

- Is there a list of installed python extensions ?

Re: PiCloud : Cloud Computing. Simplified.

#37
post #36

in the documentation it is written "While the cloud module works well as a drop-in solution for pure python code, it doesn’t handle python extensions written in C/C++. If you use custom Python extensions that PiCloud does not have installed, you’ll need to upload them to PiCloud." As I am not an advanced user of python, I find this sentence ambiguous : If I want to use PIL or the GFX from swftools.org (I need pdf to…

http://www.picloud.com/pyapi/packages/weblist/python/

Re: PiCloud : Cloud Computing. Simplified.

#38
post #36

in the documentation it is written "While the cloud module works well as a drop-in solution for pure python code, it doesn’t handle python extensions written in C/C++. If you use custom Python extensions that PiCloud does not have installed, you’ll need to upload them to PiCloud." As I am not an advanced user of python, I find this sentence ambiguous : If I want to use PIL or the GFX from swftools.org (I need pdf to…

Yes, on the configuration page you can upload an archive (or sync a repository point) which contains a python extension build script.

Re: PiCloud : Cloud Computing. Simplified.

#39

Looks nice, but I would rather have the processing power local to me. I have used the python framework, octopy. It is a mapreduce framework for python. Caveat: I have only used it for trivial problems thus far. http://code.google.com/p/octopy/

Octopy looks far too simplistic for anything too large. For example, it pushes the entire python source file to the client, including all of the data. It then assigns a client data to process? I've been reading the code for a few minutes and can't imagine using it for anything substantial...

I too prefer to have local processing, but there are times where I also like to farm out jobs to a larger HPC cluster (I'm at a university with 2 large clusters). The downside to this is that I usually have to wait in a job queue.

I guess what I really want is a hybrid approach where I can run jobs locally, but if there are too many, spin up either a loadleveller / pbs job on a university cluster or spin up a few EC2 instances.

Post reply on HN