Our collaborator Bruce Berriman has posted a presentation and a paper about hosting a workshop with hands-on sessions being run on an infrastructure set up in Amazon EC2:
The NASA Exoplanet Science Center (NEXScI) hosts the Sagan Workshops, annual themed conferences aimed at introducing the latest techniques in exoplanet astronomy to young researchers. The workshops emphasize interaction with data, and include hands-on sessions where participants use their laptops to follow step-by-step tutorials given by experts.
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Rather than attempt to run these diverse applications on the inevitable wide range of environments on attendees’ laptops, the conference organizers, in consultation with the Virtual Astronomical Observatory, chose instead to run the applications on the Amazon Elastic Cloud 2 (EC2). This paper summarizes the system architecture, the Amazon resources consumed, and lessons learned and best practices.
