Everybody Into The Pool

A few weeks back, I indulged my current obsession with grid computing, and Amazon's EC2 and S3 services in particular, with a lengthy post. I mentioned how friend Ari Lerner and I had built a really neat solution, and were going to put all of our processing farm goodness into a nice neat gemified package. Well, mostly thanks to Ari, we now have a new Ruby gem called ProcessorPool that uses EC2 and S3 to do all the hard work for you.

Based on Sinatra, with a bunch of S3 goodness mixed in, the ProcessorPool gem makes it staggeringly easy to exploit the power of the EC2 grid. More info about it is available at the Blog @ CitrusByte, and you can also check it out on RubyForge here.

All kinds of fun applications await you in the pool... image processing, video/audio transcoding, heavy computational stuff, long crawls of content... and it is fun to delegate to a pool of worker machines in the EC2 cloud.

Come on in... the pool is fine.