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Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything

workstream.paperspace.com

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Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything

#101

Post by Legogris »

mistersys wrote: post #37
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #4

This looks like a consumer targeted product. If so, they should use a "per month" pricing instead of the per hour pricing which only caters to nerds who will go through the trouble to calculate. I hope it's actually an affordable option overall compared to any other options out there.

Clearly this is a product targeted to professionals, designed for using heavy application while mobile. Gaming is a also a use case, but gamers that run heavy games tend to be nerds anyway. Per month pricing would make it very hard to price competitively for users who work 6+ hours a day vs. users who need to work with CAD files a couple of times per month. I don't know what kind of every-day consumers need to to run…

I get mixed messages. The front page says

> Moving your workflow into the cloud gives you the best hardware and networking performance possible, and helps you work on the tough stuff a normal computer just won’t do.

This is then followed by their "Advanced" specs @ 6vCPUs, 16GB RAM and 2GB VRAM. That's a mid-range laptop.

Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything

#102

Post by naravara »

al_chemist wrote: post #63
dudul wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why use this over GeForce Now? Really curious, I don't see a lot of advantages.

Paperspace supports* Linux client, GeForce Now does not. * allegedly. Tried to set up Paperspace and Parsec without result.

If your use case is gaming, does Linux support matter much? If anything I would think this would be for someone who has a Linux setup but wants to access games that aren't available.

Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything

#103

Post by jedieaston »

corenting_ wrote: post #42

Another interesting solution for this is : https://shop.shadow.tech/usen/pre-order . They are currently expanding to some countries including the US.

That's a better deal, since you get a GTX 1080 and 12 GB of RAM for $15 per month, whereas Paperspace is more like $60 per month for the same box.

Is Paperspace overpriced or is Shadow burning cash? I'd think of the latter.

Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything

#104

Post by DTE »

woah wrote: post #78

I've used Paperspace's Gradient product (hosted Jupyter notebooks), and while it is cheaper than most other options, I can't recommend it. The service has a very janky feel. When I first started, there was an issue where my instance was was stuck "shutting down" for half an hour or more and I couldn't access my code. Then there was a weird issue where some kind of geographical split between different types of instanc…

CEO of Paperspace here. I'm really sorry about this. That is not the experience that we are striving for and FWIW, since leaving beta, Gradient is much more mature at this point (many millions of hours of runtime and lots of developer work). We have been aggressively stabilizing (and building out new features) over the past few years and continue to improve the product every release. My sincerest apologies for your negative experience early on I hope you will give it another try.

Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything

#105

Post by derefr »

third_I wrote: post #73
VikingCoder wrote: post #45

I'm just going to state again what I want, which is only tangentially related to the topic... 1) I go on Github and configure a service 2) I make a wallet that people can donate to 3) I start up a virtual machine, aimed at the Github, using the wallet to pay for the time on the machine. The virtual machine host guarantees that the code at that Github is what's really running. I can imagine lots of other things I want…

You should really look into GitLab. It's free to self-host the whole thing if you want, and there's a full CI/CD pipeline (you can plug whatever you want in there). It's miles and leaps beyond what GitHub offers (different target I suppose). You'd still have to code the linking to a wallet part, but that's definitely doable.

The GP poster's point was that the hosting service needs to prove to the consumers of the app that what's running on the hosting service is the same code they can browse through on GitHub.

When you're both the developer and the consumer, you can certainly prove this to yourself (to five nines of confidence or so) by just setting up the hosting yourself. But we're talking about the case of a centralized backend for a multiuser service, e.g. a forum, where the users want to not have to trust the moral fibre of the person who set up the server, but merely trust that the infrastructure used in the hosting guarantees that it can't run anything other than the codebase (that they control.)

Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything

#106

Post by scrumper »

soulnothing wrote: post #52

I used paper space for remote gaming via Parsec. I also purchased one of their machines for remote development purposes. While I was waiting for parts to fix my laptop. The service was really good. The machine was fast, with RDP it felt close to local. They also offered very powerful hard ware. I moved on because it was a bit pricey at that point. This was about a year, year and a half ago. I think it was about 50 a…

Signing up right now for this - glad to hear it worked well. I have a Mac at home (not ideal for games) and at most a couple hours a week to do any gaming (so it's not worth buying a PC). For the absolute best machine they have, my outlay will be less than ten bucks a month. An easy sell.

Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything

#107

Post by derefr »

VikingCoder wrote: post #45

I'm just going to state again what I want, which is only tangentially related to the topic... 1) I go on Github and configure a service 2) I make a wallet that people can donate to 3) I start up a virtual machine, aimed at the Github, using the wallet to pay for the time on the machine. The virtual machine host guarantees that the code at that Github is what's really running. I can imagine lots of other things I want…

This—the ability to audit what's running on the backend you're talking to—is in large part what people get out of smart contracts on e.g. Ethereum. You can take the contract source code from GitHub, compile it (deterministically), and validate that the deployed-on-chain smart-contract binary is the same. The blockchain nature of the platform then ensures that the contract will do exactly and only what you "expect" it to do (i.e. it'll do the same thing "in production" that it does when you test it on your own machine, since any node that tries to execute the code differently would diverge its state from the consensus, and be ignored.)

In essence, a Turing-complete smart-contract blockchain is a deterministically-trustworthy compute-hosting service. It's one that has the disadvantage of all the overhead distributed auditability requires; but at least has the advantage (compared to centralized compute-hosting with remote-attestation) that it already exists and is usable right now for real-world use-cases.

(And you can also reduce the blockchain-y overhead by moving whatever backend business logic you can out of the "trust kernel" into untrusted regular machines, and then just having the "trust kernel" do the important stuff. CryptoKitties is a good example of this: the only thing their smart contract does is track who owns what kitty, because that's what people would try to dispute by forging transactions. The rest of the stuff is state in a regular centralized RDBMS, because it's dictated by the service, rather than by user input, and so is not under dispute.)

Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything

#108

Post by dalore »

I use Paperspace's core compute machines for my IDE and dev machines. It's great not having to run everything local, can use a cheap low end laptop locally but still have a beast dev machine. If I end up hosing my dev I can just start it from the last snapshot.

Granted could probably do this with any host/cloud infrastructure. But I'm happy with it.

Re: Workstream: A fast virtual computer you can use for anything

#110

Post by JPKab »

DTE wrote: post #104
woah wrote: post #78

I've used Paperspace's Gradient product (hosted Jupyter notebooks), and while it is cheaper than most other options, I can't recommend it. The service has a very janky feel. When I first started, there was an issue where my instance was was stuck "shutting down" for half an hour or more and I couldn't access my code. Then there was a weird issue where some kind of geographical split between different types of instanc…

CEO of Paperspace here. I'm really sorry about this. That is not the experience that we are striving for and FWIW, since leaving beta, Gradient is much more mature at this point (many millions of hours of runtime and lots of developer work). We have been aggressively stabilizing (and building out new features) over the past few years and continue to improve the product every release. My sincerest apologies for your n…

I'm a customer, and one thing that I think would be helpful would be to ensure that notebooks launch inside of the storage folder. In fact, I'm not sure there should be any folders other than the storage folder and another folder labelled to tell the user this data isn't going to persist, or is volatile.

I really like a lot of the features you have in place, but had weird things like files disappearing, git repos being erased except for folder name, etc.

That being said, I think there's a lot of value here, and once I defaulted to using only storage, had less issues with Gradient. I think the concept behind your company, seems to be democratizing the devops needed for getting on-demand compute, and I dig it.

Hit me up privately if you want to talk more. There's some potential ideas I'd like to discuss with you involving my employer and potentially augmenting our product with yours (and bringing customers with us). Hope that last statement tells you that despite the warts I've experienced, I really admire what you have accomplished. I'm a big, big fan of intuitive UX that simplifies high-value tasks, and I think you've achieved a lot there.

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