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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

#81

Post by desdiv »

swebs wrote: post #66
yazr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've seen just the opposite. A VPS from a cloud provider is often 2-3x the cost of an equivalent Linode.

I think your pricing information might be slightly out of date. AWS Lightsail's $5 plan is equivalent or better than Linode's $5 plan. Plus AWS Lightsail has an even more barebones plan at $3.5 per month.

Two years ago you would be perfectly correct. The cheapest AWS option back then would be a micro EC2 instance at around $20 per month IIRC.

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

#82

Post by badpun »

dagw wrote: post #56
emptyfile wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really, in America? Amazing. This is not the normal human experience at all. Raw food are usually cheaper than processed ones, anywhere in the world.

Where in the world are you? It's my normal human experience from both the UK and Sweden. Of course the stuff you make from scratch will often have a higher quality (or at least be made from higher quality ingredients) and if you want to buy similar or better quality then it will cost more. But the cheapest chocolate chip cookies you can find in the food store will be cheaper than buying ingredients and baking.

So, whatever bakery paid for ingredients, wages and owner's profit is still less that what you'd just pay for just the ingredients? What are they putting into these cookies, sawdust?

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

#83

Post by pizzapill »

ofrzeta wrote: post #64
pizzapill wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're going full circle here. The EULAs, licenses etc. of US companies that try to restrict how you can use the Hardware/Software you bought are void in Germany (probably most of EU too) and can be ignored. In many cases they void other (legal) parts of those licenses too since the license is partly illegal.

I don't think that's universally true concerning software. I tried to do some research on the jurisdiction in the EU but got to no definitive conclusion. However in case of reselling software the corresponding restriction is obviously seen as illegal (or non-binding) in the EU. On the other hand there are restrictions such as copying, running software X on Y computers etc that are valid and binding.

My blanked statement indeed does not cover some fundamental aspects. IP/Copyright laws are in place and will restrict consumer rights. So pirating software is still illegal.

BUT AFAIK you can make legal copies for Backup purposes of your legally acquired software.

Also AFAIK a restriction to run Software on a certain type of Hardware is not valid in Germany. For example I'm pretty sure that Apple can't do anything against Hackintoshs here.

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

#84

Post by StreamBright »

anaxag0ras wrote: post #72

You can also get GPU instances at much cheaper rates from Hetzner and OVH. https://www.hetzner.de/dedicated-rootserver/ex51-ssd-gpu https://www.ovh.com/world/public-cloud/instances/prices/

If you do not care about the operational stability of your clusters than OVH is a great option.

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

#85

Post by drewg123 »

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?

When I worked at Google, I really missed the dual monitor setup I had had at my previous job. I asked my manager how to get a 2nd monitor. Apparently, since I had the larger monitor, I was not allowed to get a 2nd one without all kinds of hassle. I asked if I was allowed to just buy one from Amazon and plug it in, and I was told no. I finally just grabbed an older one that had been sitting in the hallway of the cube-farm next to us for a few days, waiting for to be picked up and re-used. I'm sure somebody's inventory sheet finally made sense 2 years later when I quit, and they collected that monitor along with the rest of my stuff.

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

#86

Post by askmike »

ethbro wrote: post #79
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This has less to do with cloud vs own hardware and more about how the company is structured. I've worked in companies before with an ops department: a few people responsible for managing all the cloud servers. All the devs (like me at the time) work locally and have access to an isolated dev/uat environment provided by that team. That team had most of the show automated, they weren't really provisioning any machines by hand.

If something bad slipped into prod there was a process in place of how a dev would work together with someone from that team to fix it.

> pre-devops workflows

I guess this is what you are calling a pre-devops workflow? In a lot of fields not all devs are allowed to see/touch the complete production environment. Not everyone can go the netflix way of "everyone pushes to production and we'll just fix it when it breaks".

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

#87

Post by ovi256 »

anaxag0ras wrote: post #72

You can also get GPU instances at much cheaper rates from Hetzner and OVH. https://www.hetzner.de/dedicated-rootserver/ex51-ssd-gpu https://www.ovh.com/world/public-cloud/instances/prices/

Only in non-North American datacenters. In NA, Nvidia can enforce their driver license, which prohibits use of consumer GPUs in datacenters.

A nice advantage of non-consumer GPUs is their bigger RAM size. Consumer GPUs, even the newest 2080 Ti, has only 11 GB. Datacenter GPUs have 16GB or 32 GB (V100). This is important for very big models. Even if the model itself fits, small memory size forces you to reduce batch size. Small batch size forces you to use a smaller learning rate and acts as a regularizer.

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

#88

Post by pjc50 »

badpun wrote: post #82
dagw wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where in the world are you? It's my normal human experience from both the UK and Sweden. Of course the stuff you make from scratch will often have a higher quality (or at least be made from higher quality ingredients) and if you want to buy similar or better quality then it will cost more. But the cheapest chocolate chip cookies you can find in the food store will be cheaper than buying ingredients and baking.

So, whatever bakery paid for ingredients, wages and owner's profit is still less that what you'd just pay for just the ingredients? What are they putting into these cookies, sawdust?

The trick is that the bulk discount (or "small package premium") on the ingredients is huge. Maybe $300 for a tonne versus $1.50 for a kilo of flour?

Note that this works for electronics as well. You could buy one resistor for a cent or a thousand of them for a dollar.

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

#89

Post by dagw »

badpun wrote: post #82
dagw wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where in the world are you? It's my normal human experience from both the UK and Sweden. Of course the stuff you make from scratch will often have a higher quality (or at least be made from higher quality ingredients) and if you want to buy similar or better quality then it will cost more. But the cheapest chocolate chip cookies you can find in the food store will be cheaper than buying ingredients and baking.

So, whatever bakery paid for ingredients, wages and owner's profit is still less that what you'd just pay for just the ingredients? What are they putting into these cookies, sawdust?

What are they putting into these cookies

Cheap palm oil and other vegetable fats instead of butter, corn syrup instead of cane sugar, much lower quality chocolate than is generally available in grocery stores, various chemical stabilizers instead of eggs, artificial vanilla flavoring instead of real vanilla and so on.

Plus they obviously get everything at a massive discount since they're buying everything by the ton instead of by the kg.

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

#90

Post by pjmlp »

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?

In most medium size companies, think Fortune XXX, only IT is allowed to do that, after getting all the required approvals.

And good luck getting the cost center ID for the initial ticket submission to start with.

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