Programming on Highly Distributed Clusters

I want to practice programming on a d开发者_如何学Goistributed cluster and I would like to not have to pay. I know about Amazon EC2, but it is not free up to a certain usage kind of thing.

Is there anything like this?

Why don't you create cluster locally? You can install SW like VirtualBox and create virtual servers. There are some linux distributions that are ready to be installed on virtual server, e.g. turnkey linux.

Or if you have computers to spare you can play with Eucalyptus.

With Microsoft Azure you can simulate the cloud on your local machine for development and testing. You can also get a 1-month free trial account for the real Azure platform (I believe) to test your cloud service live.