So, I'm not sure how many people actually use Amazon Web Services (AWS) or know about it, but Amazon is allowing new customers that sign-up for AWS to join their AWS Free Usage Tier. The benefits of the AWS Free Usage Tier consists of the following: 

AWS Free Usage Tier (Per Month):
- 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
- 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Microsoft Windows Server Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
- 750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing*
- 30 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 2 million I/Os and 1 GB of snapshot storage*
- 5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*
- 100 MB of storage, 5 units of write capacity, and 10 units of read capacity for Amazon DynamoDB.**
- 25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage**
- 100,000 Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service**
- 100,000 Requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications and 1,000 email notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service**
- 10 Amazon Cloudwatch metrics, 10 alarms, and 1,000,000 API requests**
- 15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services*
- In addition to these services, the AWS Management Console is available at no charge to help you build and manage your application on AWS.

Has anyone looked into using this free tier service from Amazon for Folding at Home? For 12 months, you could basically get free Folding capability, very much akin to what many are doing with HP's beta Cloud Service.
 
More information here: AWS Free Usage Tier

 

You could certainly run uniprocessor instances, but it wouldn't amount to a lot of points.  The "Micro Instance" is a pretty tiny virtual machine: Instances of this family provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources and allow you to burst CPU capacity when additional cycles are available. They are well suited for lower throughput applications and web sites that consume significant compute cycles periodically.
Elsewhere it says a Micro Instance has "Up to 2 EC2 Compute Units (for short periodic bursts)"  and in yet another place an EC2 Compute Unit is defined as "One EC2 Compute Unit provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor"
So, you could slowly complete "classic" uniprocessor WUs.

Agreed...  I looked at this a few weeks ago...  The ROI just isn't enough...

Does "every little bit helps" not apply here?

Remember what I always say about uniprocs?
 
How with all the points chasing, they don't get done?
 
How dare someone say that it's not worth it, when you don't have to pay for it for a year...

Probably came off wrong, my apologies... 
 
It would seem to make it worth a solid amount you'll need to spam sign up for 20+ accounts, then hopefully you don't get hassled for it, etc...  If they run uninterupted and without hassle then it's kinda cool, but if I have to check on them all the time and play whack-a-mole because they're getting shut off constantly then it's more work than PPD...
 
I'd be interested for somoene to get a few and see what the average PPD ends up being I guess, and see how often they're shut off for being zombie accounts. 

Madrias, I didn't see anyone say "it's not worth it".
Figure you could get work done consistently at the rate of roughly a 600 MHz P4 (i.e. 1/4 of a real P4).  That's why I said it would get uniprocessor units done slowly.  The terms of service say that if you create more than one account you no longer get the free service, so making multiple accounts bears some risks.  I guess if everyone on the team signed up for an account we might start making a dent.
 
Update: just for the halibut, I signed up and set up a micro Linux instance.  It picked up a p6883 which is using half of the available memory.  We'll see how well it runs.  I just hope it makes the 14 day preferred deadline.
 
Update 2: time per frame around 22 minutes, so it will easily make the preferred deadline, completing this 69-pointer in about 36 hours, for about 46 points per day.

Update 3: the p6883 finished this morning, taking closer to 54 hours, so it looks like they took away my "burst" after a while.  Ends up around 30ppd on Amazon's dime, but each unit completed is one less for Madrias. 

I was looking at AWS myself, but decided not to sign up. You are on the hook for any overages that occur outside of the free tier, and I wasn't confident enough I could stay within the free tier for it to be worth the return of running a single uniproc client.
 
Thanks for trying it out and posting the results Punchy! 30PPD is pretty  harsh, even I was figuring it'd be better than that.

I didn't see any way of exceeding the 750 hour/month limit so I thought it was fairly safe.  If you saw some potential of exceeding one of the limits, let me know! 

As I recall, the billing agreement states you can get billed automatically if you exceed any of the limitations.
 
Yeah the 750 hours is plenty, but look at the limits for storage I/O. I think 2 mill is pretty safe, but I'd have no real idea of how to even monitor this. FAH does a ton of writes and logfile writes especially, there was even a thread posted in this forum from users claiming it can wear out an SSD prematurely... if that was really true, then I'd imagine storage I/O's would be an issue?
 
My main concern had been bandwidth, but looking back on it now I realize the user doesn't have to upload a disk image to get started. And they state outgoing bandwidth, not total. So that's definitely not an issue.

Okay, I see the areas of concern.  I thought the EC2 instance was separate from the Elastic Block Storage, but actually the EC2 Micro Linux instance has 10GB of EBS.  However, you can look at the stats to check usage.  So far over 48 hours it averages 0 reads/sec and about 0.25 writes/sec.  A month has about 2.6 million seconds, so at least so far it looks like it will be below 2 million IOs/month.