Hi Folks,

Just wanted to share our experience with running FS 5.2-beta on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Basically, AWS has multiple instance types (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/) and we were trying to figure out the most cost-effective approach.

We ran two subjects through FS 5.2-beta on M1 Large Instance (m1.large) and Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large Instance (cc2.8xlarge). (same subjects run on both instance). We expected cc2.8xlarge to be faster (but it is also more expensive: $2.4 per hour; 8 cores); The run-times we got:

instance-type subject start-time end-time run-time

m1.large subject-1 01:05:44 UTC 2013 15:40:45 UTC 2013 ~14hr-35mins

m1.large subject-2 01:06:06 UTC 2013 15:08:45 UTC 2013 ~14hr-02mins

cc2.8xlarge subject-1 01:26:38 UTC 2013 12:30:23 UTC 2013 ~11hr-04mins

cc2.8xlarge subject-2 01:27:28 UTC 2013 12:19:08 UTC 2013 ~10hr-52mins

Although m1.large is a few hours slower, it seems to be the more cost effective option since it is $0.24 per hour (2 cores). If you have run Freesurfer on AWS, do you have a similar experience ? Any suggestions to speed up the run-times on AWS would be very helpful.

Thanks

Mehul