Hi,
I saw that it is possible to easily render Houdini scenes on AWS and have a few questions. In the FAQ it is stated that it is more expensive per computer hour than regular AWS EC2 instances.

What does that mean? How much more is that? Is it more than a normal instance or is it more than a spot instance? Is it even possible to use spot instances? The price also depends on the OS. Linux instances are vastly chaper than Windows instances for example. So which OS do the clound nodes use?
Also, the FAQ says that it is possible to rent 2 different types of EC2 instances. Which types are that? I assume c4.8xlarge and c4.4xlarge?

Is there a downloadable price list somewhere?

If you put down an hqueue ROP down in Houdini and select the cloud radial tab then you can choose the machine type and the price will update based on your choice. This is the most up-to-date way to learn what each machine type costs.

Update: Please note that these prices may change soon. HQueue is not working yet on the Amazon cloud with Houdini 15. See this thread for details:

https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&p=195144#195144 [sidefx.com]

All right thank you very much.
I checked and it appears that the largest machine you can chose is the 108 EC2 Compute Units which would actually be 3 c4.8Xlarge instances on Amazon.
I usually render on Amazon with a cloud farm I build myself with Blender and wanted to know how the Houdini farm compares to it.

The price for 108 Units is 3.36$ / hour.

This means that one c4.8xlarge costs 1.12$ / hour.

A spot instance of a c4.8xlarge booked normally via Amazon costs, depending on the time between 0.22$ and 0.45$ making the Houdini farm 2.5 to 5 times more expensive.

This is still about a third or half the cost of a commercial third party render farm. Not bad.

samfisher
A spot instance of a c4.8xlarge booked normally via Amazon costs, depending on the time between 0.22$ and 0.45$ making the Houdini farm 2.5 to 5 times more expensive.

the 2.5 to 5 times more is because of the houdini engine / mantra license cost is included. so you can also simulate on the machines and then render the result. thats not bad even today to upload 200GB to 1TB data takes a lot of time.

Yes, not bad at all.

It is possible to simulate as well? Very interesting.
How do you do that?