[TowerTalk] antenna modeling in the cloud

[jimlux]

I'm looking for collaborators (or even just suggestions on how to 
approach it) to look at doing antenna modeling using cloud resources 
(like Amazon Lambda).

Amazon will give you 400,000 Gigabyte-seconds of compute per month for free.

The cores are faster than the ones I'm running here, but as an example, 
a model of crossed dipoles on a structure that I ran recently has 800 
segments, and I ran 150 frequency points, with two excitation points, 
and produced a single plane pattern cut of 180 points (every 2 degrees). 
It was 170 seconds and was well under a gigabyte of memory consumption

So, for a free allocation, I could have run that model a couple thousand 
times a month.

This is interesting because often times we'd like to run a systematic 
variation on a complex model of multiple antennas.  For instance, 
earlier this week I was modeling the interaction of two 20m yagis - 
those runs are around 1-2 seconds. If you run every 5 degrees of skew, 
that's 72 runs.  Start looking at changing the relative heights or 
spacings, and you can get into the thousands of runs pretty easily.

Or - examining the effect of the soil properties changing (using 
SommerfieldNorton ground) - systematically covering a range of 
parameters can add up a lot of runs pretty quick.


I'm interested in this to speed up the "time to get results" - and for 
some applications, I'd be happy to spend a few bucks - so I'm not as 
concerned about the "run it for free" aspect.

Amazon charges 0.00001667 per GB-second after you bust the "free" limit. 
So, in round numbers, I think that will work out to about 60,000 NEC 
runs per dollar. And, since you can spin up an almost unlimited number 
of instances at once - you could get your answer back from a 10,000 
iteration study in a few minutes.