Constructive criticism:
Your calculator page is unusable on mobile due to fancy "material" form filling.
Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
171–180 of 214 posts
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#172Constructive criticism: Your calculator page is unusable on mobile due to fancy "material" form filling. https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/
You are too polite. I've reported this before, and I'd easily add an expletive in front of unusable. Worse, it's not even Viewable on mobile.
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the marketing toward HPC tasks, shouldn't hyper-threading be disabled?
No? We make sure that pairs of vCPUs (hypertwins) stay together. If you'd like, you can offline your threads in the guest for a fairly similar outcome. Some of us regret that we sell an n1-standard-1 and the shared core machine types, but it's pretty nice to have a $5/month VM price point for those that want it. Most folks doing serious numerical computing end up using much larger VMs, and always crossing NUMA nodes…
I'm curious, what is there to regret about having a shared core machine type? Some people have a use for them and appreciate the cost savings.
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
damn. out of curiosity, what do u use that much ram for?
I honestly can't think of any viable purpose for that much RAM unless there's a huge amount of waste happening
How hard are you thinking? I can think of numerous scenarios where an entire working set being in RAM is useful and occasionally essential, and it is quite common as an optimization in several industries. Finance comes to mind (kdb+ is designed to weaponize tons of RAM), as does high-scale Web operations. This is part of why solid state NVMe devices are compelling, too, to help bridge the gap, but it sounds like not for your purposes.
Even on the less complicated end, some years ago throwing a shitload of page cache at MongoDB was the only way to maintain high write loads, and eventually one reached a point where one had to keep an entire shard in cache. That bottom end threshold is lower than you think. I don't know if that's changed.
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#175I've been benchmarking these against Haswell and Broadwells. Despite being 300 MHz slower, we're getting between 5 and 45% faster benchmarks on linear algebra functions that we run a lot, even without doing much work to tailor to AVX512 instructions yet. The cache is also a whopping 56 MB.
Hi Zach! Are you using MKL at all under the hood (either through numpy, scipy, etc.) or is that just from AVX2 running much better clock-for-clock on Skylake? Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
Not using Google Cloud but Intel just released MKL 2017 Update 2 today that automatically dispatches AVX512 code on supported Xeon CPUs.
Doing a quick comparison between our Haswell servers and Skylake servers we do see a nice little speed bump of ~10-20% on matrix heavy code. The bump is negligible for most other things.
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still limited to a measly 208gb of RAM? That was pretty good back in the day, but now my desktop workstation has 128gb. AWS offers up to 488gb on their latest R4 instances, and 2tb on their X1 instances released a year ago.
damn. out of curiosity, what do u use that much ram for?
We use multiple machines with 6 TB each at my job, all for use with databases.
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, we don't provide any machines with AMD processors in Cloud, today. Fun historical fact though: the 'N' in n1 meant 'Intel'. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
Interesting to know about the 'N'. How about g1 & f1? Any history behind those?
I came up with the naming scheme here. We picked n for Intel as I could be confused with i3/i5/i7.
Early work was done in AMD and we had an a1 series pre launch.
IIRC, g is for Google or Generic where there are no promises on architecture. And f was for fractional.
I've been out of Google for 2+ years now so reality may have drifted from that original scheme.
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#178Why is it important to offer Intel Skylake on cloud platforms? Is there some specific processor extensions present in Skylake that make them particularly compelling in a cloud environment for a particular industry or a particular set of needs?
MPX (hardware bounds checking) SGX (secure enclaves) TSX (Hardware Transactional Memory) SGX can store SSL keys in a hardware protected enclave that can't be accessed by hypervisors/AMT so that can be useful for security sensitive stuff. Cloudflare probably could have used MPX to prevent their recent leak with minimal performance overhead. TSX is cool.
Wasn't TSX completely disabled in all Intel processors because of silicon bugs? If it is enabled in the Skylake E5 Xeon series that Google is rolling out, does it mean the Skylake E5 Xeons are the first processors to have a working TSX implementation?
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, Azure takes a very strong platform agnostic approach. Over a third of all VMs on Azure are running Linux https://fossbytes.com/33-microsoft-azure-vms-now-run-linux-o... , (supported distributions include Ubuntu, Redhat, Centos, SUSE, Debian, and CoreOS), the Azure Container Service supports 3 open-source orchestrators (Swarm, Kubernetes, DC/OS), and the Azure WebApp PaaS service has Linux support in preview…
That's fair and you won't get any arguments from me there. It's very easy to run singleton Linux machines on Azure and I have no complaints there. I wasn't going to lay it out here, but, as I have your ear: I'm not saying it's impossible to run a Linux stack on Azure - but man, trying to image the machine, for example, is a whole rigamarole. Want to run your own image on a scale set? Oh, well, you need to craft a JSO…
For you ssh sessions, have you tried to use ssh keepalive ? (ex: ServerAliveInterval option on an openssh client)
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, why would you prefer Google Cloud to AWS?
Spending on GCP is more predictable than on AWS. Also the general behavior is more predictable. For instance all pre-emptible instances are terminated in 24 hours. On AWS based on when they need the resources. I believe that whatever GCP does, does better. Faster network, faster spinning and turning off servers, simpler quotas, etc. GCP doesn't offer that many services as AWS and most of those are not very compatible…
> For instance all pre-emptible instances are terminated in 24 hours. On AWS based on when they need the resources.
Uhh, Google will terminate preemptible instances whenever they need the resources as well. Hence the name, "preemptible."