I am looking for advice on deploying Mathematica for HPC in an on-demand cloud environment. I occasionally have Mathematica projects that require parallel computing and large amounts of RAM. These generally involve clustering, multi-dimensional scaling, geospatial transformation of large lists and geospatial plotting. I am currently running Mathematica 10.4 on an academic HPC network, but have real trouble getting the configuration I need (12 cores, 256 GB RAM, GPU array, SSD working drive) at any reasonable priority. I am looking at deploying on AWS or Azure.
Does anybody have experience with either service?
How is the Mathematica licensing handled (is it machine locked requiring a dedicated server?)
Any recommendations for OS? (Linux vs. Windows Server...I know, but I had to ask)
Thanks!