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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

#61

Post by rattray »

beisner wrote: post #35
rattray wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, why would you prefer Google Cloud to AWS?

It's cheaper for many workloads, the products work together a lot more seamlessly, instance start times are faster, and the orchestration UI is way, way, way more intuitive and user-friendly (to this user, at least). There are definitely more knobs to turn in AWS, but Google is almost at feature parity with them, and most workloads won't see a difference between the services in terms of features.

Wow, that's persuasive... is the only reason people are choosing AWS the sheer number of products they provide? (eg; Postgres RDS & Aurora)

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

#63

Post by phonon »

rattray wrote: post #61
beisner wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cheaper for many workloads, the products work together a lot more seamlessly, instance start times are faster, and the orchestration UI is way, way, way more intuitive and user-friendly (to this user, at least). There are definitely more knobs to turn in AWS, but Google is almost at feature parity with them, and most workloads won't see a difference between the services in terms of features.

Wow, that's persuasive... is the only reason people are choosing AWS the sheer number of products they provide? (eg; Postgres RDS & Aurora)

AWS has a better compliance story.

Compare

https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/

to

https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance

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

#64

Post by zbjornson »

boulos wrote: post #41
zbjornson wrote: post #18

I'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.

No MKL, just a mix of AVX2 and a bit of AVX512 written with intrinsics in C++. Working on benchmarking Eigen at the moment, which is also AVX512-optimized.

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

#65

Post by lotyrin »

rattray wrote: post #61
beisner wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cheaper for many workloads, the products work together a lot more seamlessly, instance start times are faster, and the orchestration UI is way, way, way more intuitive and user-friendly (to this user, at least). There are definitely more knobs to turn in AWS, but Google is almost at feature parity with them, and most workloads won't see a difference between the services in terms of features.

Wow, that's persuasive... is the only reason people are choosing AWS the sheer number of products they provide? (eg; Postgres RDS & Aurora)

In organizations I've worked for, we use AWS because it's politically correct to do so; non-technical leadership has heard how "Cloud" is an alternative to "IT" and have golf buddies that buy "Cloud" from Amazon.

Technical management can sometimes be persuaded, given overwhelming evidence, that competing products/services are superior or more cost-effective but ultimately conclude "we'll never sell this solution to leadership".

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

#67

Post by stuckagain »

Cyph0n wrote: post #46

Oh, so now I can't voice my opinion until I've been "in the business" for x amount of years? Yeah, nice try. Another commenter already brought that issue up, but thanks for pointing it out again. I still think that it's quite silly to claim that Ryzen Rev. A may end up being a paperweight based on a mistake that took place a decade ago. Whatever floats your boat, I guess. And from what I read, it seems like it was an…

All I'm saying is it would be better if you knew what you were talking about. AMD has been outsourcing verification to its customers for many years.

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

#68

Post by boulos »

codinghorror wrote: post #36
ppoint wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are E5 Skylakes available exclusively to Google? Can't find E5 v5 on Intel's site: http://ark.intel.com/#@Processors .

Purley is the big Skylake based server platform chipset reset for Xeon E5 and higher so Google must have early access to it. Skylake Xeon E3 is on the current older server chipsets.. Purley is supposed to be a significant improvement.

We announced with Intel back in November that we would be getting early access to Skylake [1]. Today's announcement is that we're ready to let more people in the door.

[1] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/power-up-your-G...

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

#69

Post by zbjornson »

boulos wrote: post #59
jscipione wrote: post #49

Why 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?

Skylake is an amazing upgrade, more so than even the Haswell bump. Beyond just the clock-for-clock kind of improvements, AVX512 is a huge win for many vectorized workloads (see my other comment about waiting nearly 10 years for it...). Linear algebra (or ML if you prefer), rendering, and even string operations (operating on 512-bits per instruction is a win over 256) are all a lot faster.

The other fundamental change is that most instructions now have masked variants, so you can apply an operation to only specific elements in a vector based on a mask register. This avoids branch mispredictions, which are a big performance hit in some workloads.

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

#70

Post by heh »

rattray wrote: post #61
beisner wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cheaper for many workloads, the products work together a lot more seamlessly, instance start times are faster, and the orchestration UI is way, way, way more intuitive and user-friendly (to this user, at least). There are definitely more knobs to turn in AWS, but Google is almost at feature parity with them, and most workloads won't see a difference between the services in terms of features.

Wow, that's persuasive... is the only reason people are choosing AWS the sheer number of products they provide? (eg; Postgres RDS & Aurora)

FWIW, that's not the only good stuff on GCE: * Instances have sustained use discounts - you don't need to pay in advance and reserve them and the discounts are applied very, very fairly. * Pre-emptable instances are cheap as all hell, and they are perfect for batchwork, celery workers, etc (anything disposable). You don't have to bid for them so automation is easier. * Up to 2 Gbits/second/core, depending on your workload type * CUSTOMIZABLE instances. * live migrations.

The only thing I really miss from AWS is RDS's postgres.

I don't even want to talk about Azure.

Why do people use AWS? 1. Free tier. 2. Plethora of PaaS as you mentioned. 3. AWS was there first, has brand recognition and is a safe choice for management.

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