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AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing

noahlebovic.com

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Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing

#31

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

AWS is fantastic for scientific computing. With it you can:

- Deploy a thousand servers with GPUs in 10 minutes, churn over a giant dataset, then turn them all off again. Nobody ever has to wait for access to the supercomputer.

- Automatically back up everything into cold storage over time with a lifecycle policy.

- Avoid the massive overhead of maintaining HPC clusters, labs, data centers, additional staff and training, capex, load estimation, months/years of advance planning to be ready to start computing.

- Automation via APIs to enable very quick adaptation with little coding.

- An entire universe of services which ramp up your capabilities to analyze data and apply ML without needing to build anything yourself.

- A marketplace of B2B and B2C solutions to quickly deploy new tools within your account.

- Share data with other organizations easily.

AWS costs are also "retail costs". There are massive savings to be had quite easily.

Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing

#32

Post by W-Stool »

walnutclosefarm wrote: post #24

Having had the responsibility of providing HPC for a literal buildings full of scientists, I can say that it may be true that you can get computation cheaper with owned hardware, than in a cloud. Certainly pay as you go, individual project at a time processing will look that way to the scientist. But I can also say with confidence that the contest is far closer than they think. Scientists who make this argument almos…

Let me echo this as someone who once was responsible for HPC computing in a research intensive public university. Most career academics have NO IDEA how much enterprise computing infrastructure costs. If a 1 terabyte USB hard drive is $40 at Costco we (university IT) must be getting a much better deal than that. Take this argument and apply it to any aspect of HPC computing and that's what you're fighting against. The closet with racks of gear and no cooling is another fond memory. Don't forget the AC terminal strips that power the whole thing, sourced from the local dollar store.

Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing

#33

Post by ptero »

walnutclosefarm wrote: post #24

Having had the responsibility of providing HPC for a literal buildings full of scientists, I can say that it may be true that you can get computation cheaper with owned hardware, than in a cloud. Certainly pay as you go, individual project at a time processing will look that way to the scientist. But I can also say with confidence that the contest is far closer than they think. Scientists who make this argument almos…

I think it really depends on the task. Where HIPAA violation is a real threat, the equation changes. And just for CYA purposes those projects can get pushed to a cloud. Which does not necessarily involve any attempts to make them any more secure, but this is a different topic.

That said, many scientists are operating on premise hardware like this: some servers in a shared rack and an el-cheapo storage solutions with an ssh access for people working in the lab. And it works just fine for them.

Cloud services focus for running business computing in a cloud, emphasizing recurring revenue. Most research labs are much more comfortable with spending the hardware portion of a grant upfront and not worrying about some student who, instead of working on some fluid dynamics problem found a script to re-train a stable diffusion and left it running over winter break. My 2c.

Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing

#34

Post by boldlybold »

idiot900 wrote: post #2

This rings true for me. I have a federal grant that prohibits me from using its funds for capital acquisitions: i.e. servers. But I can spend it on AWS at massive cost for minimal added utility for my use case. Even though it would be a far better use of taxpayer funds to buy the servers, I have to rent them instead.

Lots of places (Hetzner for example) will rent you servers at 10-25% the cost of AWS if you want dedicated hardware, without the ability to autoscale. You can even set up a K8s cluster there if the overhead is worth it.

Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing

#35

Post by theblazehen »

lostmsu wrote: post #25
zatarc wrote: post #11

Why does no one consider colocation services anymore? And why do people only know Hetzner, OVH and Linode as alternatives to the big cloud providers? There are so many good and inexpensive server hosting providers, some with decades of experience.

Any particular you could recommend for GPU?

https://www.genesiscloud.com/ is pretty decent

Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing

#36

Post by pclmulqdq »

Even as a big cloud detractor, I have to disagree with this.

A lot of scientific computing doesn't need a persistent data center, since you are running a ton of simulations that only take a week or so, and scientific computing centers at big universities are a big expense that isn't always well-utilized. Also, when they are full, jobs can wait weeks to run.

These computing centers have fairly high overhead, too, although some of that is absorbed by the university/nonprofit who runs them. It is entirely possible that this dynamic, where universities pay some of the cost out of your grant overhead, makes these computing centers synthetically cheaper for researchers when they are actually more expensive.

One other issue here is that scientific computing really benefits from ultra-low-latency infiniband networks, and the cloud providers offer something more similar to a virtualized RoCE system, which is a lot slower. That means accounting for cloud servers potentially being slower core-for-core.

Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing

#38

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

W-Stool wrote: post #32
walnutclosefarm wrote: post #24

Having had the responsibility of providing HPC for a literal buildings full of scientists, I can say that it may be true that you can get computation cheaper with owned hardware, than in a cloud. Certainly pay as you go, individual project at a time processing will look that way to the scientist. But I can also say with confidence that the contest is far closer than they think. Scientists who make this argument almos…

Let me echo this as someone who once was responsible for HPC computing in a research intensive public university. Most career academics have NO IDEA how much enterprise computing infrastructure costs. If a 1 terabyte USB hard drive is $40 at Costco we (university IT) must be getting a much better deal than that. Take this argument and apply it to any aspect of HPC computing and that's what you're fighting against. Th…

I remember the first time a server caught fire in the closet we kept the rack in. Backups were kept on a server right below the one on fire. But, y'know, we saved money.

Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing

#39

Post by dkobran »

lostmsu wrote: post #25
zatarc wrote: post #11

Why does no one consider colocation services anymore? And why do people only know Hetzner, OVH and Linode as alternatives to the big cloud providers? There are so many good and inexpensive server hosting providers, some with decades of experience.

Any particular you could recommend for GPU?

There are several tier-two clouds that offer GPUs but I think they generally fall prey to the many of the same issues you'll find with AWS. There is a new generation of accelerator native clouds e.g. Paperspace (https://paperspace.com) that cater specifically to HPC, AI, etc. workloads. The main differentiators are: - much larger GPU catalog - support for new accelerators e.g. Graphcore IPUs - different pricing structure that address problematic areas for HPC such as egress

However, one of the most important differences is the lack of unrelated web services related components that pose a major distraction/headache to users that don't have a DevOps background (which AWS obviously caters to). AWS can be incredibly complicated. Simple tasks are encumbered by a whole host of unrelated options/capabilities and the learning curve is very steep. A platform that is specifically designed to serve the scientific computing audience can be much more streamlined and user-friendly for this audience.

Disclosure: I work on Paperspace.

Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing

#40

Post by captainmuon »

A former colleague did his PHD in particle physics with a novel technique (matrix element method). I can't really explain it, but it is extremely CPU intensive. That working group did it on CERN's resources, and they had to borrow quotas from a bunch of other people. For fun they calculated how much it would have cost on AWS and came up with something ridiculous like 3 million euros.
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