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Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

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Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#21
post #2

How are these companies even getting these GPUs? I would imagine NVIDIA would give them all to Microsoft and Google if they are in short supply.

Google doesn't use nVidia chips, at least for AI. They have their own in house solution.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#22
Over the weekend a coworker was helping someone in our lab prepare data for an important conference talk.

We accidentally ran up a rather large bill because while the EFS storage pricing was simple enough, the usage pricing bit us.

It seems like AWS' entire business model is making the pricing so confusing that you don't know what it will cost until after you've used it. It feels weirdly similar to the US healthcare/insurance situation.

More competition in this space can only be a good thing.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#24
post #16

We're absolutely seeing the same thing even in non-GPU traditional servers. Here is an estimated monthly cost breakdown for a new GCP instance type, the n4-standard-2, in us-central1: 2 vCPU + 8 GB memory: $69.18 10 GB Hyperdisk Balanced: $0.80 3060 provisioned IOPS: $15.30 155 MB/s provisioned throughput: $6.20 Total: $91.48 Like, you can tear apart that $69/mo for 2vCPU + 8gb of memory, no problem. That's utterly i…

Also on GCP, the vCPUs are usually hyperthreads (except for t2d- instance types, and perhaps a few others). So that machine you've described has 1 CPU core.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#25
post #2

How are these companies even getting these GPUs? I would imagine NVIDIA would give them all to Microsoft and Google if they are in short supply.

Google doesn't use nVidia chips, at least for AI. They have their own in house solution.

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/gpus#nvidia_gpus_for_c...

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#26
post #16

We're absolutely seeing the same thing even in non-GPU traditional servers. Here is an estimated monthly cost breakdown for a new GCP instance type, the n4-standard-2, in us-central1: 2 vCPU + 8 GB memory: $69.18 10 GB Hyperdisk Balanced: $0.80 3060 provisioned IOPS: $15.30 155 MB/s provisioned throughput: $6.20 Total: $91.48 Like, you can tear apart that $69/mo for 2vCPU + 8gb of memory, no problem. That's utterly i…

if you don't need hyperdisk, why are you on that type of server?

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#27
post #16

We're absolutely seeing the same thing even in non-GPU traditional servers. Here is an estimated monthly cost breakdown for a new GCP instance type, the n4-standard-2, in us-central1: 2 vCPU + 8 GB memory: $69.18 10 GB Hyperdisk Balanced: $0.80 3060 provisioned IOPS: $15.30 155 MB/s provisioned throughput: $6.20 Total: $91.48 Like, you can tear apart that $69/mo for 2vCPU + 8gb of memory, no problem. That's utterly i…

IMO, the big thing holding back customers (especially smaller ones) from going on-premise these days is networking. Getting a fat pipe similar to what you get with an instance on a cloud provider can be prohibitively expensive (internet service, gear, staff, etc), especially when you want it to be highly available.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#29
post #22

Over the weekend a coworker was helping someone in our lab prepare data for an important conference talk. We accidentally ran up a rather large bill because while the EFS storage pricing was simple enough, the usage pricing bit us. It seems like AWS' entire business model is making the pricing so confusing that you don't know what it will cost until after you've used it. It feels weirdly similar to the US healthcare/…

This is precisely why I stick to dedicated servers for my own personal projects.

$40/month for a machine, doesn't get any more predictable than this.

Re: Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

#30
post #29
post #22

Over the weekend a coworker was helping someone in our lab prepare data for an important conference talk. We accidentally ran up a rather large bill because while the EFS storage pricing was simple enough, the usage pricing bit us. It seems like AWS' entire business model is making the pricing so confusing that you don't know what it will cost until after you've used it. It feels weirdly similar to the US healthcare/…

This is precisely why I stick to dedicated servers for my own personal projects. $40/month for a machine, doesn't get any more predictable than this.

If you rent a dedicated server from AWS, you will be hit for various additional fees which will likely dwarf that $40/month.

So the issue here is not really shared vs dedicated instances. The issue here is that a particular cloud provider (namely AWS) has set up an opaque fee structure.

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