Experiences with BeoPest and GoGrid Cloud Servers

I have had a chance recently to work with BeoPest and GoGrid cloud servers. BeoPest is the latest version of Pest that replaces parallel pest, allowing you to more easily connect multiple computers in the same pest run. It is much easier to use than parallel pest and works by using TCP/IP. The latter means that computers do not need to be in the same location. I recently tested this with John Doherty (author of Pest) where the master run was here in Pennsylvania and several slaves were running on John's computers in Australia. It worked flawlessly.

I am also now using GoGrid.com's cloud servers to run slave runs with BeoPest. It is fairly economical if you just need lots of computers for short time periods. I have been using Windows Server 2008 (64-bit) servers with 4 Gb of RAM. This gets you 4 processors on each server so you can run 4 separate slave runs on each one. I found the GoGrid.com servers to be extremely fast and have not had one go down yet. They are virtually the same speed as my newest Alienware Area-51 workstations that use the new Intel 6-core i7, overclocked at 3.6 Ghz. That is pretty amazing speed. Cost for each server is $18.24 per day, which is $4.56 per day per slave run. That amounts to about 200 days of slave runs to pay off an Alienware workstation. Since most Pest runs are intensive for short periods, it makes sense to use these cloud servers.