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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

#201
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I head up Product at Lambda. We are an NVIDIA preferred partner (and keep winning the preferred partner award). I don't know what the allocation numbers are for other companies, but we get a lot. It's in NVIDIAs best interest to spread the love around and make sure all the GPUs don't go to the hyperscalers.

I anyone buying AMD MI300? I am curious if anyone is finding AMD, as an alternate GPU vendor, available or useful yet?

My company, Hot Aisle, is.

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

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like your issue is with Texas, then, not with America. Why perpetuate crude and inaccurate stereotypes that smear and disparage America in general? America is spending a huge amount of money every year precisely on providing healthcare for the poor. Besides which, it looks like Medicaid does indeed operate in Texas, which is discoverable in less than 10 seconds of Internet searching: https://www.hhs.texas.gov/…

Have you considered perhaps that because I live in Texas, I know a bit more about those programs than you who have just googled and linked the top results? And that perhaps because I live in Texas, I indeed have issues with Texas (still a part of America in spite of the wishes of some on the right wing)? From your own article (I knew this stat would be in there): > Currently, Texas leads the nation in the number of u…

You said giving a fake name at the ER was the only option for poor AMERICANS to obtain healthcare.

That is categorically false, and testifes to some sort of deep seated bias against our own country profoundly embedded in your worldview -- one which extends all the way to glib counterfactual promotion of verifiably false information about the country and its supposed moral shortcomings.

2) Texas has a much larger population than 49 of the other 50 states -- about 30 million, higher than any state but California. Of course the number of uninsured residents will be higher than the national average. You didn't control for uninsured per capita.

Why are so many uninsured if it's possible (I didn't say easy) for them to get coverage? Probably, a large part of the reason is people who go around promoting the (completely false) common trope that "poor Americans just can't get health coverage, the government does nothing for them."

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

#203
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amd will never figure out drivers and software stuff. That’s always been their weakness

MI250 and MI300 are competitive for inference and training. The problem is that there's no cloud with simple registration that offers these for reasonable on demand price. This means that basically no one in the open source AI community can use them, so most development and tooling is being tested and built for NVIDIA.

I am working on solving that issue with MI300x.

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

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then pay for it with a credit card that gives you a random amount of cash back, and pay your credit card bill using your tax refund that came as a nice surprise at the end of the year, because you over withheld all year so you don’t actually even know what your real take home pay is supposed to be. No wonder Americans have no idea how the economy is doing.

I'm always surprised by people who expect and are excited for their refund. Half the country is pitching about politicians taxation plans when all the while they're volunteering to overpay out of every paycheck.

When you lack the self-control to save, over-withholding + refund becomes an ersatz year-long savings account. It's terrible, lacking any interest at all, but when it's all you've got, breaking open the piggy bank to get your money back feels good even if it doesn't make financial sense.

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

#205
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.

Are you talking about colo or an office? Because carrier-neutral colos are pre-wired with plenty of bandwidth that's 10x-100x cheaper than public clouds. Yes, you need routers but the savings elsewhere should pay for them.

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obamacare is not a plan, it's a law that set minimum standards for health insurance plans, created marketplaces to cross-shop plans across providers on a single website, and created a system where you can receive government subsidies towards their cost if your income is low enough. At $45K, you would receive subsidies towards your insurance premiums. I've bought my insurance on the ACA marketplace since it opened ten…

I use Obamacare in the rural southern way, referencing ACA and healthcare.gov, lol. I'm also in Georgia which may have different regulations regarding the deductibles. I remember looking at the plans around 2 years ago and realizing that there was no way I could afford the premium, let alone the yearly deductible. I just took another quick look at a non-Healthcare.gov site. Insurance for me would be $313/month with a…

This is the cheapest plan I could find in GA. It said it would subsidize the $357/m cost down to $113 for $45k 40 year old Male non-smoker, single. It seems quite a bit better than what you are suggesting. (I used https://www.healthsherpa.com/ to more easily check out available plans.) It covers preventative care, and after the $9100 deductible, it seems to cover pretty much everything with $0 copay, as long as its in-network.

(You also get their negotiated rates when you go to the doctor, I assume.)

https://d3ul0st9g52g6o.cloudfront.net/2024/GA/sbc/2024_58081...

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

#208
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>hook pricing (aka up front pricing that looks low and turns out high) is only rational. Yes, many deceptive business practices are rational acts on the part of the businesses. That doesn't mean they should be tolerated.

Which is exactly why they should be banned to keep the market overall healthy. Preventing deceptive practices in a market economy this is a prime example of useful government "intervention", just like supporting contract enforcement or preventing theft

They can always justify it as not knowing the price.

The sales tax rate is different in different places. It costs a different amount to ship to Florida than Alaska and picking it up at the factory is free (even if nobody does). The advertised price is if you have your own modem, renting one from the cable company is more.

None of these are inherently wrong. You should be paying more if you're having it shipped to a remote location with high shipping costs, and the cost of that shouldn't be dumped on every other customer. But it's kind of a loophole if you want the advertised price to be lower than what people are actually going to be paying in practice.

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

#209
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/…

> 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. Not just the healthcare situation, but everything. There's nothing much more stereotypically American than "not knowing what you're going to pay for something until you're billed." Dozens of little fees on you…

It's strange from a foreigners perspective because all of this looks exactly like a dark pattern made to distract and confuse gambling addicts. Why does American government allow direct predation on its own citizens?

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

#210

Would like to take a moment to recommend fly.io for GPU workloads. I've been building a prototype using them for the last couple of weeks and it's been great to use. I didn't have to jump through any hoops or apply for any quota adjustments to get started. And I especially appreciate how easy they make it to automatically scale your GPU instances to zero based on traffic.

Hn's opinion of Fly seems to fluctuate a lot. First it was an HN darling, especially with all the high-quality blog posts they were putting out, but on the latest threads there's been a lot of complaining about platform stability and features.
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