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Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

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Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake

#201

Post by Cyph0n »

dang wrote: post #184
Cyph0n wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AMD has been outsourcing verification to its customers for many years You have no idea what you're talking about if you think for a second that a large CPU vendor like AMD would delegate verification to "its customers". It's like saying that Boeing just builds planes and tells airlines to make sure they fly correctly before allowing passengers to board them.

> You have no idea what you're talking about This is uncivil and not ok on HN. Please take time to edit this kind of swipe out of your comments here.

Seriously? So when I see someone on HN who I think is clearly wrong, I can't say that? I agree that my tone could be improved, but I only said it that way in response to the parent's tone.

Also, how was our argument a "flame war"? It only lasted for 3-4 replies, and was quite civil in my opinion.

I tend to always agree with your decisions, but this one is a bit too extreme.

Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake

#202

Post by aseipp »

martinpw wrote: post #188
aseipp wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple process improvements that make Skylake faster will just be "there" -- some code will just be faster with no changes! For the numerical, AVX stuff -- it should be mostly automatic for you, if you're already using optimized libraries at the core -- MLK, BLAS, that kind of stuff. They'll be transparently upgraded for you -- ideally -- to take care of these things. They normally check what your CPU is at runtime,…

> I bet if you're using Intel MLK for example, it will probably "magically" get faster on these Skylake machines by using AVX512 automatically. (Aside, I think you mean MKL.) There is a 200MHz clock reduction when running AVX512 instructions. If your code makes heavy use of AVX512 there is of course still a big net win, but I'm curious of the impact with more heterogeneous workloads. We have an app that is a mixture…

Thanks for the correction. And FWIW this is an insanely good question and it's hard for me to immediately answer! The things I want AVX512 for are very fat SIMD registers for my cryptographic code, and I've only lightly kept up with it since AVX-512 was pushed off to Skylake-Xeon only. So I haven't worried about highly heterogenous workloads (in my head).

I'd have to look up the specifics; but does AVX512 simply slow the clock, or does it actually have some kind of limited number of hardware ports? I wonder if some clock slowdown would be very much of an issue, since clock-for-clock, you should see better performance on Skylake anyway.

Just curious, what kind of workloads do you think you're looking at here?

Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake

#203

Post by doh »

EnigmaticLion wrote: post #200
doh wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're processing videos, a lot of them. Roughly 34PB worth of data every month. Additionally we're running our search engine at top of it with couple of other services. You can check what we're up to here https://pex.com

That landing page is a whopping 9MB [1]. Please optimize it for users with slow internet like me. [1] https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170225_RN_1K80/

I apologize. We need to pay more attention to the actual website

Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake

#204

Post by dang »

Cyph0n wrote: post #201
dang wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have no idea what you're talking about This is uncivil and not ok on HN. Please take time to edit this kind of swipe out of your comments here.

Seriously? So when I see someone on HN who I think is clearly wrong, I can't say that? I agree that my tone could be improved, but I only said it that way in response to the parent's tone. Also, how was our argument a "flame war"? It only lasted for 3-4 replies, and was quite civil in my opinion. I tend to always agree with your decisions, but this one is a bit too extreme.

It's not about "tone" but content and it's quite simple, though always harder to see in one's own case. The HN guidelines say this:

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Similarly, "You have no idea what you're talking about if you think for a second that a foo like bar would baz" can be shortened to, "A foo like bar wouldn't baz."

HN's rules apply regardless of how other commenters are behaving. If they didn't, we might as well have no rules, because it always feels like others are behaving worse.

Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake

#205

Post by Cyph0n »

dang wrote: post #204
Cyph0n wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? So when I see someone on HN who I think is clearly wrong, I can't say that? I agree that my tone could be improved, but I only said it that way in response to the parent's tone. Also, how was our argument a "flame war"? It only lasted for 3-4 replies, and was quite civil in my opinion. I tend to always agree with your decisions, but this one is a bit too extreme.

It's not about "tone" but content and it's quite simple, though always harder to see in one's own case. The HN guidelines say this: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Similarly, "You have no idea what you're talking about if you think for a second that a foo like bar would baz" can be shortened to,…

Damn, those are some specific guidelines haha! I will make sure to dial down my responses in the future. Thanks.

Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake

#206

Post by fapjacks »

Mo3 wrote: post #197
fapjacks wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing, perhaps unsurprisingly, that we won't find out.

I'm guessing, not surprisingly, that you felt really good typing this comment.

How I felt about the comment?

Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake

#207

Post by martinpw »

aseipp wrote: post #202
martinpw wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I bet if you're using Intel MLK for example, it will probably "magically" get faster on these Skylake machines by using AVX512 automatically. (Aside, I think you mean MKL.) There is a 200MHz clock reduction when running AVX512 instructions. If your code makes heavy use of AVX512 there is of course still a big net win, but I'm curious of the impact with more heterogeneous workloads. We have an app that is a mixture…

Thanks for the correction. And FWIW this is an insanely good question and it's hard for me to immediately answer! The things I want AVX512 for are very fat SIMD registers for my cryptographic code, and I've only lightly kept up with it since AVX-512 was pushed off to Skylake-Xeon only. So I haven't worried about highly heterogenous workloads (in my head). I'd have to look up the specifics; but does AVX512 simply slow…

I'm having trouble finding good references now, but I am sure I remember reading that is was simply slowing the clock.

In my case, yes, Skylake would still be a win over older hardware, but the question is whether to use AVX512 or not. The workload is a real time animation system with a bunch of nodes in a graph that get evaluated in sequence. Some nodes would benefit from AVX512, but others would not. So the question is, if we vectorize those nodes that would benefit and get a speedup there, will the other unvectorized nodes now run slower as a result of the lower clock speed, canceling out the benefit.

It sounds like your case is a much better fit for AVX512. Out of curiosity, have you tried running on Xeon Phi, which also supports AVX512?

Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake

#208

Post by alxvio »

Mo3 wrote: post #193
alxvio wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using DNS for HA is a lose-lose scenario. I'll take a proper load balancer backed with a cloud provider's superior network any day.

Not if you use a low TTL. And no, I'd rather not have my traffic run or even terminate through every intelligence agency on the planet, even if that means accepting a few drops in the timeframe it takes to propagate.

... hence the lose-lose scenario. Having a low TTL just makes it your client's problem. If you want to be paranoid about the government, you can still use an L4 load balancer such as the one offered by GCP.

Run your infrastructure however you want. This setup would never fly for a real organization.

Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake

#209

Post by rincebrain »

mrb wrote: post #178
en4bz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

AIUI that was just certain flavors of Broadwell and possibly all (or maybe just all-released-at-the-time) Haswell chips, so later Broadwell steppings had a working TSX implementation.

(As an example, my Xeon D-1540, a Broadwell-family chip, advertises the TSX bits in CPU feature flags, so it's not errata'd off there.)

Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake

#210

Post by warent »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #174
warent wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I could be wrong but it really sounds like you're talking about production. If that's the case then yes, I can respect the RAM requirement and it's almost too obvious to state that it isn't purposeless.

The key here is it's a personal development workstation on which he has these resources. If that's a requirement, I would argue there's something fundamentally wrong with his development processes requiring that much data locally without even a server.

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