Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Resources:
Holmes lab AMIs:
The following construct can be used to seed the random number generator with a hostname-specific value (useful e.g. for running several parallel MCMC jobs):
handalign -rndseed `hostname | md5sum | perl -ne 's/ .*\n//;printf"ibase=16;%s%1000000\n",uc' | bc` ...
To add current-time-in-seconds to this random seed, use the following:
handalign -rndseed `hostname | md5sum | perl -ne 's/ .*\n//;printf"ibase=16;(%X+%s)%1000000\n",time,uc' | bc` ...
Finally, to add the process ID as well:
handalign -rndseed `hostname | md5sum | perl -ne 's/ .*\n//;printf"ibase=16;(%X+%X+%s)%1000000\n",time,$$,uc' | bc` ...
Note that the last one includes $ symbols, which must be escaped in a Makefile (i.e. $$$$ instead of $$).
(If on a Mac, use md5 instead of md5sum...)
-- LarsBarquist - 11 Mar 2009 | 
