Disclosure: I am a former Amazon employee on the EC2 team, and I am now at a company that uses EC2 for a great deal of our processing needs.
I have used EC2 for cpu intensive purpose. I have pretty bad experience with small instance of it. But, luckily they provide a high cpu system (5 times the small instance in cpu terms) also at double the cost.
Its work pretty fine for me.
I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.