I have jobs of about 70,000 independent calculations that take about 30 seconds each. I'm looking to cut my run time from many days on a few computers to a few hours on a lot of computers.
Do you guys support that kind of approach?
Perhaps you even have off-hour scheduling with price breaks?
You could certainly do this using droplets. Our 512MB droplet with 1 CPU core is billed at $0.007/hour and would likely be the best bet for cost effective compute instances. Since we bill to the minute based on the hourly rate we do not provide any special pricing for this use.
You will likely need to reach out to our support team to have your droplet limit increased so you can launch enough droplets in parallel. Our droplet creation page now supports the creation of up to 10 droplets at once but using the API or our doctl command line client you could script the creation and destruction of your whole cluster at once.