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Building your own deep learning computer is 10x cheaper than AWS

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Re: Building your own deep learning computer is 10x cheaper than AWS

#71

Post by rjzzleep »

VHRanger wrote: post #70
dagw wrote: post #29

You're forgetting the cost of fighting IT in a bureaucratic corporation to get them to let you buy/run non-standard hardware Much easier to spend huge amounts of money of Azure/AWS and politely tell them it's their own fucking fault when they complain about the costs. (what me? no I'm not bitter, why do you ask?)

They seriously can't buy a graphics card and slap it in the PCIe slot?

Last time I worked in big corporate I had to use their laptop even if I didn't plug mine into anything, because of security. At some point said laptop got stolen and I sent a buying request for a new one. Took a year without feedback and a heated discussion for my boss to accuse me for having been to passive on it. I was then using my own laptop. At that point you can't even call it shadow IT anymore.

Any buying requests go through the direct supervisor, the financial department, the director of the company, then back to the supervisor for the final signature. And because it's Germany, it was on paper. When I say any buying request, I mean any. From any programming book, to any accounting book for finance or any HR book.

You'd think people at the top have better things to do. You think that, until you hear the department heads discuss which excel format files should be saved in.

Re: Building your own deep learning computer is 10x cheaper than AWS

#73

Post by dagw »

VHRanger wrote: post #70
dagw wrote: post #29

You're forgetting the cost of fighting IT in a bureaucratic corporation to get them to let you buy/run non-standard hardware Much easier to spend huge amounts of money of Azure/AWS and politely tell them it's their own fucking fault when they complain about the costs. (what me? no I'm not bitter, why do you ask?)

They seriously can't buy a graphics card and slap it in the PCIe slot?

They seriously can't buy a graphics card and slap it in the PCIe slot?

Well I mean they obviously can...

First of all you're assuming IT will just let you have a decent machines with PCIe slots. It's all about laptops don't you know. Workstations are so 2012.

Secondly while they might, after much begging, let me have one graphics card to put into this one old workstation I've scavenged, they certainly won't let me have a machine with top of line specs with several cards or, heaven forbid, several machines, (but they'll happily let me have a laptop that costs just as much for less than half the performance).

Re: Building your own deep learning computer is 10x cheaper than AWS

#74

Post by Const-me »

yazr wrote: post #31
maltalex wrote: post #24

I don't see what's surprising here. This is the ski rental problem [0]. Would it surprise anyone to learn that renting a car is more expensive in the long run compared to buying one? This is the same thing, only the time scales are different. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ski_rental_problem

Because the cloud has economies of scale and benefits from specialization (cheaper power, bulk buying prices, remote land prices, etc) Hence, some of these saving should be passed on to consumers and it should be cheaper. The counter argument is that the cloud is over-engineered (redundancy, backups, better software) for enterprise customers. You u are paying for all these benefits whether u want to or not.

> the cloud has economies of scale and benefits from specialization

For GPUs it's the opposite. With some legal BS, NVidia forbids Amazon to rent out GeForces. Doesn't look OK to me, I don't think NVidia has a right to deside how people will use the hardware they have bought. Anyway, Amazon has to buy Teslas, and Teslas are 10 times more expensive.

Re: Building your own deep learning computer is 10x cheaper than AWS

#75

Post by sheeshkebab »

VHRanger wrote: post #70
dagw wrote: post #29

You're forgetting the cost of fighting IT in a bureaucratic corporation to get them to let you buy/run non-standard hardware Much easier to spend huge amounts of money of Azure/AWS and politely tell them it's their own fucking fault when they complain about the costs. (what me? no I'm not bitter, why do you ask?)

They seriously can't buy a graphics card and slap it in the PCIe slot?

No, not in most corporate it shops... card had to be “procured” through the corporate vendor, support has to be in place, drivers for some shitty obsolete os flavor has to be installed... that’s assuming you can even find a server in rack that is recent enough to even run it all, if not then same shit has to happen with the server.

It’s all ITs own fault frankly - or more like fault of corporations approaching IT as mostly a desktop Helpdesk support.

Re: Building your own deep learning computer is 10x cheaper than AWS

#76

Post by mynegation »

VHRanger wrote: post #70
dagw wrote: post #29

You're forgetting the cost of fighting IT in a bureaucratic corporation to get them to let you buy/run non-standard hardware Much easier to spend huge amounts of money of Azure/AWS and politely tell them it's their own fucking fault when they complain about the costs. (what me? no I'm not bitter, why do you ask?)

They seriously can't buy a graphics card and slap it in the PCIe slot?

They seriously can’t.

Typically if you want to buy some hardware in a big Corp you go to some preapptoved internal catalog to pick up from one or two models of desktop or a laptop from vendors like Dell, HP, or Lenovo - whatever was preapproved. Sometimes you can fine tune specs but not in a very wide range.

Buying anything outside of that will require senior level approval and - heaven forbid - “vendor approval study” (or similar verbiage).

Re: Building your own deep learning computer is 10x cheaper than AWS

#77

Post by gaius »

screye wrote: post #63
psergeant wrote: post #4

> Nvidia contractually prohibits the use of GeForce and Titan cards in datacenters. So Amazon and other providers have to use the $8,500 datacenter version of the GPUs, and they have to charge a lot for renting it.

Is Nvidia doing this only because they are a monopoly in the space and practically extorting here ? Or are there any genuine costs associated with data center gpu models ?

The data centre editions have bigger heatsinks so you can run them 24/7. But that would cost a few dollars, not thousands...

Re: Building your own deep learning computer is 10x cheaper than AWS

#78

Post by paradite »

This works if your machine learning is just for data analytics purposes.

The article somehow completely ignores integration with other services to query or update the model, which requires some API to be hosted on a static ip or domain, as well as the devops process.

Re: Building your own deep learning computer is 10x cheaper than AWS

#79

Post by ethbro »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #45
dagw wrote: post #29

You're forgetting the cost of fighting IT in a bureaucratic corporation to get them to let you buy/run non-standard hardware Much easier to spend huge amounts of money of Azure/AWS and politely tell them it's their own fucking fault when they complain about the costs. (what me? no I'm not bitter, why do you ask?)

In most companies, AWS just becomes a new front-end to the same old IT bureaucracy, and dev teams are still disallowed from creating their own instances or EMR clusters or setting up new products like their own Redshift instance or ECR deployment solution.

Respectfully, those companies' cloud architects suck.

If someone goes to the trouble to migrate onto cloud, and then replicates pre-devops workflows... wow.

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