Live data from Hacker News

AI Dungeon 2 costing over $10k/day to run on GCS/Colab

twitter.com

71–80 of 215 posts

Re: AI Dungeon 2 costing over $10k/day to run on GCS/Colab

#71
I realise Cloudflare is a dirty word around here but you could pay $20/mo on their pro plan and serve this file, along with any other static assets, through their CDN.

I do this for assets for my own games hobby site. Granted, not getting tens of thousands of downloads a day, but there's nothing in their Ts&Cs to indicate to me that it wouldn't work even if I were.

Re: AI Dungeon 2 costing over $10k/day to run on GCS/Colab

#73
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weren’t they already doing the processing server side? If it were client side then it wouldn’t be costing so much to run git clone every time, as the download would be from GitHub to the user’s computer. It would be free, in fact. My impression of the situation is that every user who tried to play would result in a new instance to spin up on Google’s cloud services and then begin downloading a fresh copy of the repo…

A client side request to GitHub would require them to serve up a relevant CORS header, but I do think you're right about me misunderstanding where execution is taking place. I'm unfamiliar with Jupyter Notebooks, and assumed "downloading" meant "to the client". I, too, am now confused about why this is set up like it is. Probably some constraint of Jupyter Notebooks that I'm unaware of.

If you install and run Jupyter on your local machine, it’ll spin up a web server on localhost and then connect to it in your browser. All of the Python code runs on the server and only the results are sent to the client, to be displayed in the browser.

Re: AI Dungeon 2 costing over $10k/day to run on GCS/Colab

#74
post #62

Not blaming them, but still a nice example to illustrate the myth that 'the cloud' will let you operate without a sysadmin (someone that knows about setting up and managing infrastructure). Yes, there might not be servers you have to rack and electrical power to be provisioned, but the amount and granularity of the parameters and decisions on the virtual fabric to be decided on and continuously monitored for changes…

The non cloud version is your website goes offline for a day due to high traffic. Depending on the website that may or may not be preferable to variable costs.

The Twitter feed says the $10k+ are for serving about 60k Visitors a day. This isn't exactly high traffic. A dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited Traffic and 1gbit/s uplink, a 16 core Threadripper, 1TB SSD and 128G RAM costs €140/Month and would be absolute overkill for 60k Visitors. It doesn't have GPUs, though.

Re: AI Dungeon 2 costing over $10k/day to run on GCS/Colab

#75
Definitely worth it:

She blushes slightly and smiles shyly. "Oh, I'm sure we will. But first, let me take off my clothes".

> say "no, that's prohibited"

"No, it isn't". She says with a smile. "But if you insist on not marrying me, then at least don't touch me". > say "I will marry you"

She nods happily and kisses you passionately on your lips. The two of you embrace each other as you kiss her deeply. It is only after this that you realize that you are actually married.

Re: AI Dungeon 2 costing over $10k/day to run on GCS/Colab

#76

Still not clear why a university research lab would keep this running 'for a few more days' and not pull the plug immediately until either having the costs under control or some sort of reasonal matching benefit in place.

All the AI and CS labs I worked for were perpetually short of funding. The end of year budget things is an accounting pitfall that I have met many times in industry, government and academia alike. I tis the result of money allocated but not spend before the end of the budget year not just is taken away, but also with high probability leading to a budget reduction the next year as 'you clearly didn't need it'.

Needs otoh aren't clearly delineated by the budget calendar.

Re: AI Dungeon 2 costing over $10k/day to run on GCS/Colab

#77
post #74
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The non cloud version is your website goes offline for a day due to high traffic. Depending on the website that may or may not be preferable to variable costs.

The Twitter feed says the $10k+ are for serving about 60k Visitors a day. This isn't exactly high traffic. A dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited Traffic and 1gbit/s uplink, a 16 core Threadripper, 1TB SSD and 128G RAM costs €140/Month and would be absolute overkill for 60k Visitors. It doesn't have GPUs, though.

It absolutely is high traffic if each and every one of them is downloading your NN model

Re: AI Dungeon 2 costing over $10k/day to run on GCS/Colab

#78
post #77
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Twitter feed says the $10k+ are for serving about 60k Visitors a day. This isn't exactly high traffic. A dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited Traffic and 1gbit/s uplink, a 16 core Threadripper, 1TB SSD and 128G RAM costs €140/Month and would be absolute overkill for 60k Visitors. It doesn't have GPUs, though.

It absolutely is high traffic if each and every one of them is downloading your NN model

I see the model size is 6G - a bit larger than I thought :) 100gbit/s upstream would cost an additional 1k€/month.

The larger problem is that people didn't actually download the model, but apparently got custom server instances that got a copy of the model plus a gpu to run them on.

Re: AI Dungeon 2 costing over $10k/day to run on GCS/Colab

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The game's GitHub page[1] states that you would need a "beefy" GPU ~12 GB and CUDA to play the game locally. I think that's why the author was serving the game through Colab since the majority of users probably don't have a 12GB GPU. [1] https://github.com/AIDungeon/AIDungeon/

Ooof, yes, now I see where the $10K/day is coming from... As I have demonstrated, I've really not much of a clue when it comes to AI, but do users really need 12Gb GPU RAM, 100% of the time? Maybe it's possible to use one GPU for multiple users?

Google Colab gives each user a dedicated Nvidia Tesla K80 GPU for 12 hours for free, which is super cool and presumably why the project is on Colab. But as each user spins up their own Colab instance it pulls down the 6GB of GPT-2 model weights, incurring 30-40 cents of data egress charges against the GCP Storage Bucket that the data is stored in.

60k users yesterday * 6GB each -> 360TB of data egress!

Normally, a scenario like this wouldn't involve bandwidth costs because GCP -> GCP same-region bandwidth is free, but Colab is technically not part of GCP, so the bandwidth charge is being assessed as egress to the public internet, which is pricy for that much data. Though it's probably still a lot cheaper than paying for the GPU-hours for that many users.

Post reply on HN