Amazon EC2 Instructions
Go to this link to redeem your credits using the code you received from the course staff. You will have to enter an amazon login (if you don't have one already), and you will have to sign up for EC. Note that you will be required to give a credit card, and very importantly, that card will be charged (!!) if you exceed you $100s of credit. Note also that Amazon may charge a small temporary fee (or "hold") of $1.00 to verify your credit card, but this hold will be refunded.
After signing up for EC2, you should be able sign in to the AWS management console. Click the EC2 tab, and select "Launch instances". You will have create a new key pair and download the .pem file (e.g. "key.pem"). This key will allow you to ssh into any new instances. Most ssh clients require you to change the permissions on this key (chmod 600 key.pem).
When creating an instance, you have to select a type. Make sure to select a "Large (7.5 G)" machine with the Basic 64-bit Amazon Linux AMI 2010.11.1 Beta operating system. This size instance costs 38 cents per hour, so you should have about 250 hours on instances like this. Don't worry about security groups or other extra features.
Once you have selected and created an instance, the console should show the instance "booting". Once created, you can click on it. At the bottom of the screen, some information about the instance should be available. Find the "Public DNS" field. This is the address that you can ssh to. To connect to your machine, you can use the command:
ssh -i key.pem ec2-user@ec2-50-17-77-31.compute-1.amazonaws.com
Note that "ec2-user" is literal -- all machines have this account be default. These instances should already have the Java 1.6 installed. To get the code and data, we recommend using wget. For example, you can use
wget --http-user=[account] --http-password=[password] http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~klein/cs288/sp11/restricted/data2.tar.gz
to download the data. This should take about 3 minutes. Note that use of network bandwidth is also charged (though very slightly), so try not to overuse bandwidth.
Once you have the data, and java, you can also upload your code and perform experiments.
To terminate an instance, you can go back to the AWS console and right click and instance. Note that you *must* terminate an instance when you are not signed in or you will be charged for the time that it is sitting idle. Be very careful not to leave an idle instance!