PyABM can be installed on an Amazon Elastic Computing Core (EC2) instance to allow you to run agent-based models (ABMs) in the cloud. If you are new to Amazon EC2, see the EC2 overview before you get started. Amazon also has a special page on high performance computing (HPC) with EC2. You will also probably want to look at the available Amazon EC2 instance types, and of course the pricing information before you get started.

A basic cluster with a manager node and two worker nodes will run you about $1.50 - $2.00 per hour, depending on the options you choose. You can vary the number of CPU cores and the memory in your worker nodes depending on the needs of your modeling. In general my models are CPU limited (not requiring large amounts of memory) so I will create a small cluster of three Amazon EC2 instances, with one “Large Standard On-Demand” (m1.large) instance to manage the cluster, and two “Extra Large High-CPU On-Demand” (c1.xlarge) instances as worker nodes.This configuration gives me a total of 16 processor cores to work with (8 per worker node), so I can run 16 model runs at the same time.

The cost to run this cluster is $1.58 per hour with current Amazon EC2 pricing.
Note that pricing varies depending on the region you choose to place your clusters in - the cheapest region is currently in northern Virginia in the United States.

The easiest way I have found to get Amazon EC2 clusters up and running is using StarCluster - a python program that makes setting up, running, and managing Amazon EC2 clusters much easier.