VPS and Cloud Computing - free test accounts. Part I

There was a time, not long ago, when I needed to find as many as possible free VPS or Cloud Computing (CC) trial accounts for carrying intense mathematical computations. I did succeed, there was plenty of them, and I'd like to share my results. Be not scared, though, many of them are being hosted in russian speaking countries, so you will need basic vocabulary to be able to swiftly use them.

First, let me start with a nice russian listing of available free testing offers: (note that page scroll follows at the bottom). In case you're interested - an english google translation goes here. What you can find there is a ready-to-use list of VPS providers with specification of the free trial period. What is even more interesting some of the companies place their current offers in the "Comments" section below the listing, so you can check once in a while for the most recent promotional actions.

Additionally, on the left there's a panel with packed listings of available known VPS providers both with and without support for russian-speaking clients - I thought you might find it interesting too.

When checking the free trial offers please be aware that some of them will be limited for citizens of Russia only, or may require you to have a working mobile phone for verification. And rememeber - there's Google's translate app to assist you at any point.

So let's start with the results. By most the best one I had in my hands is the one which occupies #1 place on my list:

1. www.scalaxy.ru - what I got there was a 16-core trial account! When you start the test you receive a prepaid amount of currency to spend on the products (200 Russian Rubbles AFAIR). Then you setup your account parameters with the CPU/nabdwidth sliders. There is an important thing to note: to be able to SSH to your account you need to use some of the virtual money you received to "buy" an IP address. Moreover, you should do that at the setup phase - if not, you are not allowed to do that once you make your order and it is realized (which also costs virtual cash). The only solution then is to dump the virtual machine you created and start another one. Another observation you may find handy is the RAM occupation which with the default settings is very high. As it turned out it is a result of the on-the-fly feature which enables you to modify parameters of your account as you are using it. You can free that memory by moving the RAM Upper Limit slider when your virtual machine is paused to the value you're satisfied. Lastly - they don't seem to care about imposing any limits on shared CPU resources, so don't hesitate and use all 16 cores.
Unfortunately, as I checked today, their testing offer has been cancelled (I hope only for a while), but see it for yourself - maybe they put up something interesting soon.

At the end - a little teaser: excerpt from /proc/cpuinfo of my trial account:
processor        : 0
vendor_id        : GenuineIntel
cpu family        : 6
model                : 26
model name        : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           X5550  @ 2.67GHz
stepping        : 5
cpu MHz                : 2666.760
cache size        : 8192 KB
physical id        : 0
siblings        : 1
core id                : 0
cpu cores        : 1
apicid                : 0
initial apicid        : 3
fpu                : yes
fpu_exception        : yes
cpuid level        : 11
wp                : yes
flags                : fpu de tsc msr pae cx8 apic sep cmov pat clflush acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht syscall nx lm constant_tsc rep_good nopl pni ssse3 cx16 sse4_1 sse4_2 popcnt lahf_lm
bogomips        : 5338.04
clflush size        : 64
cache_alignment        : 64
address sizes        : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

15 more cores follow :)