Cloud Computing -- Useful in my Situation?

[AlphaMHC]

Hello,

I'm a newcomer to these forums, so I apologize if this thread is out of place. I am working on a research project that involves me comparing the 3D structures of proteins.

-This process is computationally expensive, and I need to compare thousands of proteins. As an idea of the scale I am discussing, it takes my personal computer, with a fairly good i7 processor, running on all cores, 1 hour to perform 17,000 comparisons. With 5000 proteins, I need to make a total of ~12,000,000 comparisons. That would mean it would take me a month (or so) with my computer running full blast 24 hours a day, to complete these computations -- of which I need to do three different rounds, with the first (17,000 per hour) being significantly faster than the others.
-The process also requires the presence of many files, totaling, most likely, in the 10-20 GB range.
-The process does NOT require significant GPU use, and what I think is moderate RAM use.
-As I am coding the program myself, there might be several updates to the programming as I move along.
-The end result should be a single, large file.

1. Would this be a good thing to run in some sort of cloud situation?
2. If so, is there a recommended cloud service that would match this situation?

[kainrage]

I guess your i7 must have completed most of the comparisons by now .
Still, i would have gone for Google MapReduce.
Implementing mapreduce using hadoop cluster on amazon Ec2 should do the trick. I dont have much hands-on on hadoop, but this is the best i know of from what i read.

Kain