Most of the comments get fixated on the most and least expensive options in this (AWS where you pay through the nose / own DC where you'll get bad service from your institution and have to fight with hw procurement stuff). What about the middle ones presented, the more reasonably priced cloud/rental server providers?
AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing
251–260 of 281 posts
Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing
#252If you pay $500 to form an LLC with Stripe Atlas you get $10,000 worth of AWS credits that can be used any way you want. It's a pretty solid way to cost effectively do scientific computing even if you need like five companies.
If a policy change is made because of this comment. I'm sorry. For sure let me know though. I'll put it on my resume.
Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing
#253I'm surprised no-one mentioned Amazon Lightsail by now. Anyway, yes, AWS can be super expensive especially if you don't know what you're doing, regardless of type of processing.
Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing
#254Even 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, alth…
Author here. I agree with your points! I use AWS for a computational biology company I'm working on. A lot of scientific computing can spin up and down within a couple hours on AWS and benefits from fast turnaround. Most academic HPCs (by # of clusters) are slower than a mega-cluster on AWS, not well utilized, and have a lot of bureaucratic process. That said, most of scientific computing (by % of total compute) happ…
Honestly spot instances sound perfect for those kind of requirements
Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
From https://iceberg.apache.org > Iceberg is a high-performance format for huge analytic tables. How would that help speedup S3? Genuine question?
Iceberg doesn’t use the directory structure to represent what objects belong to which table. The change allows objects to have significant entropy in the object keys prefix. This avoids hot spotting s3 and allows for greater bursts to s3 QPs.
Oh wow, thats neat! Thanks!
Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing
#256Having 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…
Your comment about cooling reminded me of a fun anecdote from my time in academia.
My PhD involved quite a lot of high performance computing simulations. We kept running into problems where on warm days, all our jobs would get killed pretty consistently. Our IT guy noticed a pattern where the temps would be perfectly normal, and then suddenly out of nowhere go through the roof, triggering a thermal shutdown of the racks.
In the end our IT guy camped out in the server room on a hot day to watch what was happening. The Astrophysics' cabinet were directly infront of ours, and they had jerry rigged their cabinet door so that when it got too hot, it would swing open and their hot air would be blown all over the neighbouring cabinets...
Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am dealing with the exact opposite problem: "Oh you mean, we should leave the EC2 instance running 24/7 ??? No way, that would be too expensive"... to which I need to respond "No, it would be like $15/month. Trivial, stop worrying about costs in EC2 and S3, we're like 7 people here with 3 GB of data." I deal with Scientists that think AWS is some sort of a massively expensive enterprise thing. I can be, but not for…
Don't say the budget outloud near AWS. They'll find a way to help you spend it.
Yeah, by following the "documentation" and "best practices."
Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
More than half of security penetrations in our institution (A medical center - research - med school complex) over the 8 years I worked there, ending in 2020, came through the research arm, even though Research accounted for no more than 10% of enabled servers in the infrastructure. And we're talking APT penetrations. They weren't looking for HIPAA data (although I used that example in my original post), they were lo…
I appreciate your perspective, but it seems the security team should be watching for reverse proxies, tunnels, and other firewall anomalies for on-prem hardware just as a normal course of biz. And if a PI installs a self-managed server, that really should not gum up the works. All that being said, I have never worked at a place (or in a dept) whose threat profile made APT a real thing.
Obviously we do all those things. But you NEVER want an outside, and particularly APT owned machine inside your network. They can be well hidden and still do very real damage.
You're fortunate if APTs don't consider you a worthy target. They are no joke, and in most cases are playing a long game, more interested in penetration, persistent presence, and quiet theft of information, than in doing anything you'd notice - until they aren't. We had one who burned an asset that had been cultivated on our network for a couple of years to make a hard press play for information about a very particular high profile patient immediately after that patient had been seen (the fact that the patient was seen was public information). But with over 20,000 servers and 300,000 total nodes on the network - some of which cannot be fully patched because they run software someone has to have access to but which won't run on the newest versions of OSs or databases - you still don't know what else they've burrowed into.
A big tech company supplier to our organization had a very telling incident that ended up being detected on our side of the connection, where a brief mistake by network admins opened a channel through their layers of protection for their buid pipeline. In the minutes it was open, an APT detected the access (likely because they already owned something internal), and inserted code into their certified OS build pipeline, which we ended up with in our institution.
Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing
#259We'll put. My company is current suffering through this...
Re: AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t worry, we do incremental backups during weekdays and a full backup on Sunday. We use 2 tapes only, so one is always outside of the building. But you know, we saved money.
We had a million dollars worth of hardware installed in a closet. It had a portable AC hooked up that needed it’s water bin changed every so often. Well I was in the middle of that. When the Director decided to show off the new security doors. So he closed the room up. Then found out that new security doors didn’t work. I find out as I’m coming back to turn AC back on. Room will get hot really fast. We get office Sec…
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