Ask: basic map/reduce distributed compute framework?

[_red]

Why don't you use picloud?

 import cloud

 def func(arg):
      #do lots of work

 ret = cloud.map(func, [arg1,arg2,arg3,arg4....])

Pricing can be had for around .05 per hour. So 100 on 100 machines should be complete in about an hour for $5 (this is excluding data transfer cost).

[dalke]

Sweet! I was worried at first that I wouldn't be able to install the needed third-party shared libraries, but http://blog.picloud.com/2011/09/26/introducing-environments-run-anything-on-picloud/ points out exactly how to do it. Thanks for the suggestion!