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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

#141

Post by Fomite »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #31

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 train…

One thing to consider:

I don't control my AWS account. I don't even have an AWS account in my professional life.

I tell my IT department what I want. They tell the AWS people in central IT what they want. It's set up. At some point I get an email with login information.

I email them again to turn it off.

Do I hate this system? Yes. Is it the system I have to work with? Also yes.

"AWS as implemented by any large institution" is considerably less agile than AWS itself.

Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing

#142

Post by Fomite »

renewiltord wrote: post #49

> Most scientific computing runs on queues. These queues can be months long for the biggest supercomputers – that's the API equivalent of storing your inbound API requests, and then responding to them months later Makes sense if the jobs are all low urgency. We have a similar problem in trading so we have a composite solution with non-cloud simulation hardware and additional AWS hardware. That's because we have the h…

I did have to chuckle a bit because, working on HPC simulations of the pandemic during the pandemic, there was an awful lot of "This needs to be done tomorrow" urgency.

Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing

#143

Post by mangecoeur »

ptero wrote: post #96
crazygringo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And it works just fine for them. Until it doesn't because there's a fire or huge power surge or whatever. That's the point -- there's a lot of risk they're not taking into account, and by focusing on the "it works just fine for them", you're cherry picking the ones that didn't suffer disaster.

> there's a lot of risk they're not taking into account I see it the other way: experimental scientists operate with unreliable systems all the time: fickle systems, soldered one-time setups, shared lab space, etc. Computing is just one more thing that is not 100% reliable (but way more reliable than some other equipment), and usb data sticks serve as a good enough data backup.

Or your university might have it's own backup system. We have a massive central tape-based archive that you can run nightly backups to.

Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing

#144

Post by whatever1 »

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…

Nah for us it was the department IT guy who set up once everything (a full cluster of 50 r720s) and works like a dream.

Properly provisioned linux machines need no maintenance. You drive them until there is a hardware failure.

Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing

#145

Post by icedchai »

charcircuit wrote: post #126
dmicah wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Research involving human subjects (psychology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics, etc.) requires institutional review board approval and informed consent, etc. but mostly doesn't involve HIPAA either.

That is not a law.

There are actually laws around such things. You can read about them here: https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/index.html

Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing

#146

Post by kortex »

What does the landscape look like now for "terraform for bare metal"?. Is ansible/chef still the main name in town? I just wanna netboot some lightweight image, set up some basic network discovery on a control plane, and turn every connected box into a flexible worker bee I can deploy whatever cluster control layer (k8s/nomad) on top of and start slinging containers.

Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing

#147

Post by Moissanite »

aBioGuy wrote: post #23

Furthermore, scientific computing often (usually?) involves trainees. It can difficult to train people when small mistakes can have five figure bills.

This is the biggest un-addressed problem, IMO. Getting more scientific computing done in the cloud is where we are inevitably trending, but no-one yet has a good answer for completely ad-hoc, low value experimentation and skill building in cloud. I see universities needing to maintain clusters to allow PhDs and postdocs to develop their computing skills for a good while yet.

Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing

#148

Post by FpUser »

crazygringo wrote: post #62
withinboredom wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummm. I’ve def been unable to do anything for entire days because our AWS region went down and we had to rebuild the database from scratch. AWS goes down, you twiddle your thumbs and the people you report to are going to be asking why, for how long, etc. and you can’t give them an answer until AWS comes back to see how fubar things are. When your own hardware rack goes down. You know the problem, how much it costs to…

I'm not talking about temporary outages, I'm talking about data loss. With AWS it's extremely easy to keep an up-to-date database backup in a different region. And it's great that you haven't personally encountered disaster, but of course once again that's cherry-picking. And it's not just a component overheating, it's the whole closet on fire, it's a broken ceiling sprinkler system going off, it's a hurricane, it's…

>"With AWS it's extremely easy to keep an up-to-date database backup in a different region"

It is just as extremely easy on Hetzner or on premises

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