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Currently I have a quite high end laptop to run diverse software in the realm of (software) engineering and simulation/numerics. I was wondering whether it would make sense to run something like a server at home or rent cloud space/computation capacity to run calculations faster and just display the results on a mobile device (notebook/tablet). I am running windows 10 and what I would imagine is to see the screen exactly like I do now but to have the computations done on the server. Do there exist suitable and practical solutions to that end? I just need some suggestions to start me in the right direction. My requirements would be:

  • minimum setup effort
  • running applications "normally" saying I do not want to code my applications in a way to send out calculations to a server to calculate it, I want to run my OS on the server
  • high computation power
    • possibility to extend if more is necessary
    • budget: up to 2000 Euro (2300 USD)

My current laptop is a Lenovo Yoga 260 with Intel Core i7. The idea is somehow to avoid the high cost of buying a mobile device with high performance when the same computation power is available cheaper as cloud/server solution and I have a great internet connection. Although the solution should ideally be able to run all my applications on the server and I just use a tablet or something as end device for display and IO. Applications I am running often:

  • MS Office solutions
  • Chrome browser
  • Matlab (numerical computations)
  • C code
  • Visual Studio
  • Atom text editor
hcl734
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  • You didn't state what your current system was, is it a server class laptop with a Intel Xeon (server class) CPU? – DemiSheep Jun 28 '19 at 14:50
  • Can you tell us what sort of things you're running? How fast they're running right now/how fast you'd like them to run? What your budget would be? Any size/power/noise requirements? If you're willing to buy used? – JMY1000 Jun 29 '19 at 04:03
  • I updated my question to reflect a bit better my ideas. Thanks for your feedback! – hcl734 Jun 29 '19 at 18:45
  • What do you think of Microsoft Azure? Is it suitable? I would be eligible for a 100$ trial as academia member. Can I install on azure vm all the applications I want or am I bound to their 'app store'? – hcl734 Jul 01 '19 at 07:03
  • I have closed this question as primarily opinion-based as only you can answer the question if you should build/buy a server or if you should use a cloud solution. – Cfinley Jul 01 '19 at 18:58
  • I am asking for directions for further research not an answer to the question: Should I buy it or not? Sorry that is not opinion based for me that is a discussion about trading off different dimensions of possible solutions. – hcl734 Jul 01 '19 at 20:48
  • The kind of solution you are asking for seems to be possible by using remote desktop combined with a high-end PC or VM accessible over the internet or on your LAN. Maybe you could update your question to ask for the pros/cons of using a cloud VM vs your own server PC for this type of workload. – Romen Jul 02 '19 at 15:29

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