14 ms·

GPUs Are Now Available for Google Compute Engine and Cloud Machine Learning

449 points by boulos 10y ago

boulos 10y ago
(Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud and contributed to this effort). As I said back in November [1] for our initial announcement, the most exciting thing (for me) is that we let you mix and match cores and GPUs. You can see that spelled out in a nice table in the docs [2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12963902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12963902 [2] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/gpus/ https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/gpus/
- pavanky 10y ago
  I was excited when I read that Google would offer both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs in the November announcement[1]. Is there any timeline on when AMD GPUs will show up ? [1] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/announcing-GPUs-for-Google-Cloud-Platform.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/announcing-GPUs...
  - boulos 10y ago
    As I said below, "Soon" (and the page says so). You might want to attend Google Cloud NEXT [1], with most of your ticket price being turned into credits for Cloud usage :). [1] https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com/ https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com/
- zer0nes 10y ago
  Can you explain how this is done? Does this mean that VM and the GPUs can be on different host machines? Will it affect the GPU-CPU communication performance?
  - detaro 10y ago
    Sounds like if you max the GPUs per CPU core they have CPU cores "left over" that they then use for CPU-only instances, instead of splitting a host to a predefined pattern of just GPU instances that use up all the CPU as well.
    - boulos 10y ago
      Yep!
- geoka9 10y ago
  Sorry for being off-topic: can you guys consider introducing something similar to AWS's free tier? It doesn't have to have a lot free resources but it should be lengthy (6+ months, ideally at least 1 year). I recently started a new project, and while I'd prefer to use GC, I had to go with AWS because they offer one year for free (and GC's 2 months is not nearly enough to validate an idea).
  - vgt 10y ago
    That's valid feedback. GCP's free tier is more valuable and more flexible than AWS, but only for 2 months instead of 12. There are also perpetual free tiers for several GCP services - AppEngine, BigQuery, Firebase. No comments on your specific feedback, but please do join GCP NEXT March 8-10 for some exciting updates [0]. (Work on Google Cloud, NOT in marketing :)) [0] https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com/ https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com/
    - wsh91 10y ago
      Cloud Datastore has a perpetual free tier, too: https://cloud.google.com/datastore/ https://cloud.google.com/datastore/ :) (I work on it.)
      - vgt 10y ago
        Thanks, I forgot.. there are probably others I'm missing :/
    - nivertech 10y ago
      no livestream?
      - vgt 10y ago
        they should have one up closer to the date.
    - nostrademons 10y ago
      The tricky part of a 2 month free trial is that it's not nearly enough time to explore the offerings unless you're a company that's already got a product ready to go and staff to migrate it full-time (and I assume the latter is exactly who you'd want to charge full price to). I took advantage of the 2-month GCP free trial, and ended up using 1 GCE instance, 2 Cloud Storage buckets, your cloud storage webhosting & DNS, and....that's it. I don't even really know what other services exist. It takes time to program things...by the time you get around to realizing that there are other GCP services that may help your project, the trial's already over. Since there's a dollar cap as well, I don't see the problem with extending the trial out to a long calendar time-period.
- malux85 10y ago
  Oh I love it! I'm designing the distributed backend for my Deep Learning startup now (https://signalbox.ai https://signalbox.ai), this is going to be great. Awesome work!
  - fnbr 10y ago
    What type of architecture are you using? We're starting to set up a distributed backend at http://www.bugdedupe.com http://www.bugdedupe.com, and there don't seem to be a lot of resources out there about how to do it right.
    - malux85 10y ago
      I wrote it myself, IPC is shared memory, RPC is Thrift, but this is really just metadata, with a lot of wrangling for performance.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Keyframe 10y ago
  You guys should talk (internally) to Zync and offer redshift and octane rendering on your infrastructure!
kozikow 10y ago
I know you are working on better GPU support in kubernetes, but it would be awesome if I could just grab my image that already run in nvidia-docker and run it on GKE.
- fest 10y ago
  You can do that on Nimbix/Jarvice. Submit a Docker image, start batch job and get an e-mail once it's finished. 4 core 32GB RAM machine with K80 costs ~$1.06 there.
krona 10y ago
When (if ever) will we see Pascal cards in the cloud?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- boulos 10y ago
  > AMD FirePro and NVIDIA® Tesla® P100s are coming soon. from cloud.google.com/gpu (our landing page). That's currently limited on availability of hardware, testing, etc. but it really should be "soon". Note though that P100s are massive and expensive, so we don't intend to get rid of K80s or anything once we have P100s.
sheerun 10y ago
FYI Google's K80 ($0.7, pay-per-minute) are cheaper than AWS's K80 ($0.9/h, pay-per-hour), as well as Azure's K80 ($1.08/h, pay-per-hour).
- boulos 10y ago
  Yep! And for distributed training, the per-minute billing is incredibly important. But just a correction: Azure also does per-minute billing (following suit from GCE way back in the day).
- minimaxir 10y ago
  Google's $0.70 rate is in addition to the normal instance cost, so math is more complicated if you don't have a machine already. (Alhough, a low-end high memory machine is $0.126/hr, so the sum is still lower than Amazon)
  - boulos 10y ago
    Yes, but you can connect any number of GPUs to an n1-standard-1, so feel free to add $.05/hr :).
    - gwern 10y ago
      Is the n1-standard-1 instance fast enough to not be the bottleneck for the K80?
      - boulos 10y ago
        It really depends on what you're doing. If you are doing large transfers over PCIe back and forth, not really. But lots of things work just fine. The bigger challenge for large ML models is the memory you'd need to back it. But with GCE you can happily do a custom machine with up to 6.5 GB per vCPU, just so you can fit the output ;).
    - NegatioN 10y ago
      Slightly off-topic, but I don't know where to get help with this. I see one of our projects has gotten a quota of 16 GPUs in asia-east1, us-central1, us-east1. However we seem to have been allocated nothing in europe-west1. Is this an error, or simply something I have to manually ask for somewhere? "Quota 'NVIDIA_K80_GPUS' exceeded. Limit: 0.0" :( I'm so psyched to finally be able to use GPUs on GCE instead of AWS, so any help would be appreciated.
nswanberg 10y ago
Awesome. Separately, can tensorflow models trained on Cloud ML be downloaded yet?
- boulos 10y ago
  As Cloud ML is "just" hosted TensorFlow, once you train the model it stores a .meta file in GCS for you. You can import this in TensorFlow [1] for serving elsewhere if you so choose. Is that what you're after? [1] https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/r0.11/how_tos/meta_graph/ https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/r0.11/how_tos/meta_graph...
  - nswanberg 10y ago
    Thanks. That works in Cloud ML now? I'll try it. The copy on https://cloud.google.com/ml/ https://cloud.google.com/ml/ under Portable Models says "In future phases, models trained using Cloud Machine Learning can be downloaded for local execution" so I hadn't looked into it further.
    - boulos 10y ago
      Huh... maybe I'm mistaken. Lemme ask the experts and get back to you. [Edit: Okay, we've decided that the exported model it produces is what you'd expect. We're going to update the landing page, once we can agree on what it should say.]
      - nswanberg 10y ago
        Thanks!
SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
Slightly off topic, but I have two questions: 1. Are GPUs covered by the free trial (ie, can that $300 be spent towards GPU instances)? 2. How is support for GCP? I've been curious about trying GCP, but held off over GPU support (since AWS was covering my needs and I do ML stuff mostly) and general support (since Google doesn't have a great reputation for supporting products). Also, perhaps an affiliated person can chime in with something about the roadmap to stable GPU support. (It currently says there may be breaking changes.)
- boulos 10y ago
  1. At this time, we don't grant quota for GPUs for free trial customers (hello various coin miners!). However, if you upgrade from your free trial, you do keep your $300, and that's just money :). 2. Unlike consumer-facing products, GCP is focused on business. We offer paid support plans [1] with high (measured) customer satisfaction. I know several of the people in the support teams (and you see them here on HN as well), and we're really trying to defeat the meme of "Google doesn't do support". As far as "stable GPU support", this is just confusing language surrounding our usual "Beta" terms [2]. Once it becomes Generally Available, no changes would be made. But moreover (for GCE anyway), we don't make API breaking changes from Beta to GA (Beta to GA is "just" about stability in production). [1] https://cloud.google.com/support/ https://cloud.google.com/support/ [2] https://cloud.google.com/terms/launch-stages https://cloud.google.com/terms/launch-stages
  - chipperyman573 10y ago
    >1. At this time, we don't grant quota for GPUs for free trial customers (hello various coin miners!). However, if you upgrade from your free trial, you do keep your $300, and that's just money :). What do I have to upgrade to? Isn't GCE all per-minute? Do I just have to pay $0.05 for a standard instance and then use the $300 from my trial? Also, is coin mining against any TOS? I'm not planning on doing it, I'm just curious.
    - boulos 10y ago
      Sorry, upgrading to a paid account (abuse risk is just too high for the free trial, so we keep the quota limits low). Coin mining is not against the TOS. However, because it's usually economically irrational, it's usually abuse. If you don't pay for your GPUs (fake credit card) it's awfully economically rational though ;).
Xcelerate 10y ago
This is great! Just out of curiosity, how does the $0.70 / hour rate compare to the per-hour electricity cost of running a K80 (at full load)?
- overcast 10y ago
  K80 maximum input power is 300W. The average price people in the U.S. pay for electricity is about 12 cents per kilowatt-hour. So, around 4 cents an hour?
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Plus you need to cool that 300W in a datacenter, which costs a few cents I am sure.
    - overcast 10y ago
      Google is renewable at this point I believe.
      - bpicolo 10y ago
        Which doesn't even remotely mean their energy is free (though they don't pay as much as you do at home per unit, because they specifically build datacenters where they can get power cheaper, because it's a huge cost at datacenter scale)
        overcast 10y ago
        I didn't say it was even remotely free, but it's at a scale compared to consumers that it's pretty damn close. 70 cents a minute is A LOT to pay to run these GPU's on Google's end. Which is the point of this discussion.
      - Buge 10y ago
        On the market, renewable energy costs more than non-renewable, simply because there is a higher demand for renewable, and non-renewable has no benefit for consumers.
tomovo 10y ago
Anyone checked if this is compatible with Blender GPU rendering? On my old Mac machine GPU rendering doesn't work; I can still get a 16-core VPS for a few hours when I'm in a hurry but this has the potential for more performance I guess..?
- boulos 10y ago
  I believe Cycles (the Blender renderer) only relies on CUDA [1], so it should work. Depending on which AMD card you had on your Mac, it sounds like it might not be supported by Cycles. Because the NVIDIA K80 doesn't do Display though, you'd need to run say vnc or run Cycles from the command line. [1] https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/cycles/gpu_rendering.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/cycles/gpu_ren...
  - tomovo 10y ago
    My iMac 2011 doesn't work with GPU Cycles but that's OK. And I've successfuly boosted render times by renting the multicore VPS by the hour already (commandline, specify different frame range on each machine to render).
    - tech_man7 10y ago
      You might want to check out Golem (https://golem.network/ https://golem.network/). They're working on very cheap Blender rendering. They're on Slack: http://golemproject.org:3000/ http://golemproject.org:3000/
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
seangrogg 10y ago
Out of curiosity, are there strong reasons to leverage GPUs in standard web application development from a general-purpose standpoint? Can I leverage this to enhance a general-purpose server or database? If so, anywhere I can read more? Always interested in what kinds of things one can do when new offerings like this are made.
- user5994461 10y ago
  GPU have no application whatsover for the usual web applications.
- wmf 10y ago
  Besides 3D graphics and machine learning, GPUs are also good for image resizing/encoding and video encoding/transcoding. But I haven't heard of anyone trying to accelerate Node.js or MongoDB on GPUs.
- yeukhon 10y ago
  Short answer: no. Long answer: if and only if you can really parallelize your processing into very small calculation each doesn't take a lot of memory, and you have a lot of time of writing special code using special framework. Perhaps streaming encoding in real time could be one, but that's already sort of beyond general web application. GPU is powerful because a GPU usually has 100+ cores. Each core is weak and inefficient, but power adds up when you have 100+ cores available. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_graphics_processing_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_g...
  - arnon 10y ago
    GPUs have over 3000 cores nowadays (http://images.nvidia.com/content/tesla/pdf/nvidia-tesla-p100-PCIe-datasheet.pdf http://images.nvidia.com/content/tesla/pdf/nvidia-tesla-p100...)
- tmostak 10y ago
  You can run MapD (https://www.mapd.com https://www.mapd.com) and get big speedups over CPU analytic databases (http://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html http://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html). We'll be launching on Google Cloud soon.
porker 10y ago
Hopefully soon someone will create a GCE image for WebPageTest. It's been a pig to get up and running, but Amazon's per-hour billing is expensive for a machine needed 10-15 minutes every hour.
- theDoug 10y ago
  (I work at Google, I have my biases, but…) You might find good fun with our Preemptible VMs, which I think will land about ~$7/month: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible
  - luka-birsa 10y ago
    Preemptible VMs + Kubernetes = Awesome. If you manage to build you app/infrastructure in away that can survive nodes shutting down at random times (or if you don't care about restarts) then you can reduce your infra costs for 80%. We have a staging cluster running on preemptive instances and as soon as one instance goes away we get a different one. Everything gets deployed automatically. Regular internal users checking out various webpages don't even notice. We're looking into changing our 24/7 infra (which needs to be 24/7) to something that can be run mostly on preemptive (with a couple of normal instances for services that can't be randomly killed). Super happy about our move to GCP and our K8S experience.
- discodave 10y ago
  AWS CodeBuild now gives you per minute billing. But it has limited instance types.
  - porker 10y ago
    Unfortunately CodeBuild looks to be build only, not install a full software suite on the machine and run it. Otherwise, if it'd load an AMI - ideal!
ortekk 10y ago
Out of curiosity, can you... run video games with it?
- curuinor 10y ago
  ... if you can deal with the 250-2000ms display lag sure and you have to use a remote windowing dealie
  - wickedlogic 10y ago
    Is that number based on your experience using it this way with something like RDP/TurboVNC, or anecdotal based on other cloud providerS?
    - curuinor 10y ago
      I tried with AWS GPU once and only once. Probably if you spend time and effort you can get it down a fair bit
      - NegatioN 10y ago
        From my experience, network in GCE is way more stable and usable than it's AWS counterpart. So maybe we can see another OnLive rise again ;) (I'm joking, but there has to be a day when it's possible, right?)
  - boulos 10y ago
    I'm only 23ms from us-west1. See my other note about OpenGL/DirectX right now, but you shouldn't assume anything like those round-trip times...
  - mullen 10y ago
    Don't use Wi-Fi. My lag was 300ms from my desktop to US-West-2 and then I used an ethernet cable and it dropped to 30ms.
    - 10y ago
8166284 10y ago
Does anyone else find it kind of odd that Google, a company famous for having no human support at all anywhere who shuts down any attempts at contacting a human within its ranks for support on ANY of their products or services, always seems to deploy a small army of senior tech people to answer questions every time there is an article posted on HN. Strange double standards afoot, some users matter, others not so much.
- throwaway2048 10y ago
  Users that (potentially) fork over kilowads of cash have a way of attracting special attention.
  - jpatokal 10y ago
    0.15 kilowad/mo is sufficient: https://cloud.google.com/support/ https://cloud.google.com/support/
- fixermark 10y ago
  How do you distinguish Google intentionally deploying senior tech people to HN from Google just having a lot of senior tech people who read HN? ;)
  - theDoug 10y ago
    Yeah, the latter is literally the case. No one is 'deployed' anywhere, and it's a little amusing to think that we have "no support," but would deploy people to web forums, when looking to promote a commercial business. (We have support, more than 600 security engineers alone, we just offer commercial support for a commercial product.)
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- boulos 10y ago
  For what it's worth, I'm not "deployed" here. And as I've said on this forum numerous times: we offer real, paid support for Google Cloud.
minimaxir 10y ago
Looking at the docs, it appears that the CUDA drivers have to be manually installed on the host image, which takes time/money. Is there a GCP Image with CUDA drivers pre-installed? Or is that not possible with the hardware architecture?
- boulos 10y ago
  SIGH. Because GPL you can't pre-install the NVIDIA driver. At that point, it sadly makes more sense to have you roll your own and then bake the image. I'll gladly hand out refunds for the X minutes this takes (don't forget that on kernel upgrades you get to do it again when the kernel headers change!), but like you I wish it weren't so.
  - moonbug22 10y ago
    Feed the installer the right flags and it will run unattended. install Dkms and it'll rebuild automatically on kernel updates
    - boulos 10y ago
      Yes, that's correct. But, you still must have the user do so. Otherwise, you're distributing the resulting artifact (the Nvidia driver linked against the kernel) which is GPL (kernel) and not (NVIDIA). But IANAL.
- arnon 10y ago
  Amazon Linux AMI for their GPU instances also does not include the CUDA driver.
  - gigatexal 10y ago
    Just run a cuda container.
    - AlexCoventry 10y ago
      Can you point to an example of this? I have been installing nvidia-docker, and it sounds like what you're proposing is substantially simpler.
diamonis 10y ago
O/T I guess...Does Google have plans for FPGA instances preferably with design tools (for $.70 an hour :) !)?
tomarshubham24 10y ago
AWS has spot instances which are roughly ~1/10th the price of the regular EC2 instances. Anything equivalent here?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- wsh91 10y ago
  There are discounts if your instances can be pre-empted: https://cloud.google.com/preemptible-vms/ https://cloud.google.com/preemptible-vms/. The pricing isn't variable like EC2 spot instances, however.
  - vgt 10y ago
    Time for me to shamelessly plug my TL;DR blog on Google's Preemptible VMs: https://medium.com/@thetinot/google-clouds-spot-instances-win-big-and-you-should-too-5b244ca3facf https://medium.com/@thetinot/google-clouds-spot-instances-wi...
  - candiodari 10y ago
    From the site: > You cannot attach GPUs to preemptible instances. GPUs do not receive sustained use discounts. So sorry, no.
    - wsh91 10y ago
      The question didn't even mention GPUs, and there's no reason that what you mention can't change in the future. It was a pointer.
arnon 10y ago
Are the cards physically in the same machine, or are they in a remote chassis and connected through the network? I think on P2, Amazon's cards are remote, and there is pretty significant latency when using them for time-sensitive computing. What kind of performance can we expect from GCP compared to AWS P2?
- 1024core 10y ago
  The "Restrictions" section may answer some of your questions: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/gpus/ https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/gpus/
- thesandlord 10y ago
  They are connected directly to the host with PCIe, so you should get "bare metal" performance.
  - arnon 10y ago
    I've heard that before. I'll believe it when I see it :)
    - thesandlord 10y ago
      Anyone can try it today :) I'd love to see your findings, I'm curious as well!
bsaul 10y ago
A bit off topic, but i recently realized how much the cost per cpu is really competitive in cloud offerings compared to reserved instances in regular hosting providers, but the network costs are absolutely outrageous. Cpu costs may be something 5 to 10 times more expensive in the cloud, but network are close to 100 times. Any hosting provider will offer you a 250 mbps unlimited network access for your macine, whereas consumming that much bandwidth in google cloud for a month will cost you more than 1000$. How come is the difference that big ?
- mastazi 10y ago
  > the cost per cpu is really competitive in cloud offerings > Cpu costs may be something 5 to 10 times more expensive in the cloud So are CPUs more or less expensive in the cloud? Also I assume by "cloud offerings" you mean AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and the like, and by "regular hosting providers" you mean GoDaddy, BlueHost and the like? Or perhaps you mean Paas vs Saas offerings?
  - hyperknot 10y ago
    I believe he means OVH (+Kimsufi, Soyoustart), Online.net, and Hetzner for example. If you are interested in what 1/100th of AWS price looks, have a look at Online's server order page for example [1]. [1] https://console.online.net/en/order/server https://console.online.net/en/order/server
    - gorodetsky 10y ago
      Yes and no: yes you can get a Quad-Core 64GB RAM + SSD server for $55/month (source: https://www.hetzner.de/de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex51ssd https://www.hetzner.de/de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex51ss...). But there's one more spec that matters: networking. It takes completely different amount of effort to provide 1Gbps connectivity versus 40Gbps per server. Most of the providers like Hetzner/OVH provide former, while GCE provides the latter. I'm not saying it's bad, in fact for most of the people 1Gbps would be more than enough. But it's not something that is fair to omit. Disclaimer: I don't work for Google, just from my experience.
danjoc 10y ago
What happened to TPUs? http://austriantribune.com/informationen/165669-googles-new-tpu-accelerator-chip-speeds-machine-learning-systems http://austriantribune.com/informationen/165669-googles-new-...
- frankchn 10y ago
  TPUs are for Tensorflow-based computation only, rather than being generally CUDA compatible so they can run everything from Deep Learning to fluid dynamics simulations. I believe they are also for Google internal applications right now, so not generally available.
rahimnathwani 10y ago
I know it's early, but has anyone tried using one of these instead of the AWS p2.xlarge recommended for use in http://course.fast.ai/ http://course.fast.ai/ ?
wiradikusuma 10y ago
Sigh. When I first use Google cloud (lowercase c), it was only App Engine (CMIIW). I woke up one day, now it has more than a dozen offerings, confusing like AWS. Does anyone have, specifically for AI/ML, a list of "If you want to do X, use Y" for Google Cloud offerings? The official list (https://cloud.google.com/products/machine-learning/ https://cloud.google.com/products/machine-learning/) doesn't help much. Would appreciate if it's explained by layer (higher such as ready-to-use Speech Recognition and lower where you possibly need to setup some infra stuff). EDIT: I'm looking something like this (explains AWS offering by layer) but for Google -> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/ai/welcome-to-the-new-aws-ai-blog/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/ai/welcome-to-the-new-aws-ai-bl...
- vgt 10y ago
  Try this: https://hackernoon.com/what-are-the-google-cloud-platform-gcp-services-285f1988957a#.jyn2n8l1s https://hackernoon.com/what-are-the-google-cloud-platform-gc... Or for the really lazy: https://twitter.com/gregsramblings/status/832223967096090624/photo/1 https://twitter.com/gregsramblings/status/832223967096090624...

449 points by boulos 10y ago

(Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud and contributed to this effort). As I said back in November [1] for our initial announcement, the most exciting thing (for me) is that we let you mix and match cores and GPUs. You can see that spelled out in a nice table in the docs [2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12963902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12963902 [2] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/gpus/ https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/gpus/

pavanky 10y ago
I was excited when I read that Google would offer both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs in the November announcement[1]. Is there any timeline on when AMD GPUs will show up ? [1] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/announcing-GPUs-for-Google-Cloud-Platform.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/announcing-GPUs...
- boulos 10y ago
  As I said below, "Soon" (and the page says so). You might want to attend Google Cloud NEXT [1], with most of your ticket price being turned into credits for Cloud usage :). [1] https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com/ https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com/
zer0nes 10y ago
Can you explain how this is done? Does this mean that VM and the GPUs can be on different host machines? Will it affect the GPU-CPU communication performance?
- detaro 10y ago
  Sounds like if you max the GPUs per CPU core they have CPU cores "left over" that they then use for CPU-only instances, instead of splitting a host to a predefined pattern of just GPU instances that use up all the CPU as well.
  - boulos 10y ago
    Yep!
geoka9 10y ago
Sorry for being off-topic: can you guys consider introducing something similar to AWS's free tier? It doesn't have to have a lot free resources but it should be lengthy (6+ months, ideally at least 1 year). I recently started a new project, and while I'd prefer to use GC, I had to go with AWS because they offer one year for free (and GC's 2 months is not nearly enough to validate an idea).
- vgt 10y ago
  That's valid feedback. GCP's free tier is more valuable and more flexible than AWS, but only for 2 months instead of 12. There are also perpetual free tiers for several GCP services - AppEngine, BigQuery, Firebase. No comments on your specific feedback, but please do join GCP NEXT March 8-10 for some exciting updates [0]. (Work on Google Cloud, NOT in marketing :)) [0] https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com/ https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com/
  - wsh91 10y ago
    Cloud Datastore has a perpetual free tier, too: https://cloud.google.com/datastore/ https://cloud.google.com/datastore/ :) (I work on it.)
    - vgt 10y ago
      Thanks, I forgot.. there are probably others I'm missing :/
  - nivertech 10y ago
    no livestream?
    - vgt 10y ago
      they should have one up closer to the date.
  - nostrademons 10y ago
    The tricky part of a 2 month free trial is that it's not nearly enough time to explore the offerings unless you're a company that's already got a product ready to go and staff to migrate it full-time (and I assume the latter is exactly who you'd want to charge full price to). I took advantage of the 2-month GCP free trial, and ended up using 1 GCE instance, 2 Cloud Storage buckets, your cloud storage webhosting & DNS, and....that's it. I don't even really know what other services exist. It takes time to program things...by the time you get around to realizing that there are other GCP services that may help your project, the trial's already over. Since there's a dollar cap as well, I don't see the problem with extending the trial out to a long calendar time-period.
malux85 10y ago
Oh I love it! I'm designing the distributed backend for my Deep Learning startup now (https://signalbox.ai https://signalbox.ai), this is going to be great. Awesome work!
- fnbr 10y ago
  What type of architecture are you using? We're starting to set up a distributed backend at http://www.bugdedupe.com http://www.bugdedupe.com, and there don't seem to be a lot of resources out there about how to do it right.
  - malux85 10y ago
    I wrote it myself, IPC is shared memory, RPC is Thrift, but this is really just metadata, with a lot of wrangling for performance.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Keyframe 10y ago
You guys should talk (internally) to Zync and offer redshift and octane rendering on your infrastructure!

kozikow 10y ago

I know you are working on better GPU support in kubernetes, but it would be awesome if I could just grab my image that already run in nvidia-docker and run it on GKE.

fest 10y ago
You can do that on Nimbix/Jarvice. Submit a Docker image, start batch job and get an e-mail once it's finished. 4 core 32GB RAM machine with K80 costs ~$1.06 there.

krona 10y ago

When (if ever) will we see Pascal cards in the cloud?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
boulos 10y ago
> AMD FirePro and NVIDIA® Tesla® P100s are coming soon. from cloud.google.com/gpu (our landing page). That's currently limited on availability of hardware, testing, etc. but it really should be "soon". Note though that P100s are massive and expensive, so we don't intend to get rid of K80s or anything once we have P100s.

sheerun 10y ago

FYI Google's K80 ($0.7, pay-per-minute) are cheaper than AWS's K80 ($0.9/h, pay-per-hour), as well as Azure's K80 ($1.08/h, pay-per-hour).

boulos 10y ago
Yep! And for distributed training, the per-minute billing is incredibly important. But just a correction: Azure also does per-minute billing (following suit from GCE way back in the day).
minimaxir 10y ago
Google's $0.70 rate is in addition to the normal instance cost, so math is more complicated if you don't have a machine already. (Alhough, a low-end high memory machine is $0.126/hr, so the sum is still lower than Amazon)
- boulos 10y ago
  Yes, but you can connect any number of GPUs to an n1-standard-1, so feel free to add $.05/hr :).
  - gwern 10y ago
    Is the n1-standard-1 instance fast enough to not be the bottleneck for the K80?
    - boulos 10y ago
      It really depends on what you're doing. If you are doing large transfers over PCIe back and forth, not really. But lots of things work just fine. The bigger challenge for large ML models is the memory you'd need to back it. But with GCE you can happily do a custom machine with up to 6.5 GB per vCPU, just so you can fit the output ;).
  - NegatioN 10y ago
    Slightly off-topic, but I don't know where to get help with this. I see one of our projects has gotten a quota of 16 GPUs in asia-east1, us-central1, us-east1. However we seem to have been allocated nothing in europe-west1. Is this an error, or simply something I have to manually ask for somewhere? "Quota 'NVIDIA_K80_GPUS' exceeded. Limit: 0.0" :( I'm so psyched to finally be able to use GPUs on GCE instead of AWS, so any help would be appreciated.

nswanberg 10y ago

Awesome. Separately, can tensorflow models trained on Cloud ML be downloaded yet?

boulos 10y ago
As Cloud ML is "just" hosted TensorFlow, once you train the model it stores a .meta file in GCS for you. You can import this in TensorFlow [1] for serving elsewhere if you so choose. Is that what you're after? [1] https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/r0.11/how_tos/meta_graph/ https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/r0.11/how_tos/meta_graph...
- nswanberg 10y ago
  Thanks. That works in Cloud ML now? I'll try it. The copy on https://cloud.google.com/ml/ https://cloud.google.com/ml/ under Portable Models says "In future phases, models trained using Cloud Machine Learning can be downloaded for local execution" so I hadn't looked into it further.
  - boulos 10y ago
    Huh... maybe I'm mistaken. Lemme ask the experts and get back to you. [Edit: Okay, we've decided that the exported model it produces is what you'd expect. We're going to update the landing page, once we can agree on what it should say.]
    - nswanberg 10y ago
      Thanks!

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago

Slightly off topic, but I have two questions: 1. Are GPUs covered by the free trial (ie, can that $300 be spent towards GPU instances)? 2. How is support for GCP? I've been curious about trying GCP, but held off over GPU support (since AWS was covering my needs and I do ML stuff mostly) and general support (since Google doesn't have a great reputation for supporting products). Also, perhaps an affiliated person can chime in with something about the roadmap to stable GPU support. (It currently says there may be breaking changes.)

boulos 10y ago
1. At this time, we don't grant quota for GPUs for free trial customers (hello various coin miners!). However, if you upgrade from your free trial, you do keep your $300, and that's just money :). 2. Unlike consumer-facing products, GCP is focused on business. We offer paid support plans [1] with high (measured) customer satisfaction. I know several of the people in the support teams (and you see them here on HN as well), and we're really trying to defeat the meme of "Google doesn't do support". As far as "stable GPU support", this is just confusing language surrounding our usual "Beta" terms [2]. Once it becomes Generally Available, no changes would be made. But moreover (for GCE anyway), we don't make API breaking changes from Beta to GA (Beta to GA is "just" about stability in production). [1] https://cloud.google.com/support/ https://cloud.google.com/support/ [2] https://cloud.google.com/terms/launch-stages https://cloud.google.com/terms/launch-stages
- chipperyman573 10y ago
  >1. At this time, we don't grant quota for GPUs for free trial customers (hello various coin miners!). However, if you upgrade from your free trial, you do keep your $300, and that's just money :). What do I have to upgrade to? Isn't GCE all per-minute? Do I just have to pay $0.05 for a standard instance and then use the $300 from my trial? Also, is coin mining against any TOS? I'm not planning on doing it, I'm just curious.
  - boulos 10y ago
    Sorry, upgrading to a paid account (abuse risk is just too high for the free trial, so we keep the quota limits low). Coin mining is not against the TOS. However, because it's usually economically irrational, it's usually abuse. If you don't pay for your GPUs (fake credit card) it's awfully economically rational though ;).

Xcelerate 10y ago

This is great! Just out of curiosity, how does the $0.70 / hour rate compare to the per-hour electricity cost of running a K80 (at full load)?

overcast 10y ago
K80 maximum input power is 300W. The average price people in the U.S. pay for electricity is about 12 cents per kilowatt-hour. So, around 4 cents an hour?
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Plus you need to cool that 300W in a datacenter, which costs a few cents I am sure.
  - overcast 10y ago
    Google is renewable at this point I believe.
    - bpicolo 10y ago
      Which doesn't even remotely mean their energy is free (though they don't pay as much as you do at home per unit, because they specifically build datacenters where they can get power cheaper, because it's a huge cost at datacenter scale)
      - overcast 10y ago
        I didn't say it was even remotely free, but it's at a scale compared to consumers that it's pretty damn close. 70 cents a minute is A LOT to pay to run these GPU's on Google's end. Which is the point of this discussion.
    - Buge 10y ago
      On the market, renewable energy costs more than non-renewable, simply because there is a higher demand for renewable, and non-renewable has no benefit for consumers.

tomovo 10y ago

Anyone checked if this is compatible with Blender GPU rendering? On my old Mac machine GPU rendering doesn't work; I can still get a 16-core VPS for a few hours when I'm in a hurry but this has the potential for more performance I guess..?

boulos 10y ago
I believe Cycles (the Blender renderer) only relies on CUDA [1], so it should work. Depending on which AMD card you had on your Mac, it sounds like it might not be supported by Cycles. Because the NVIDIA K80 doesn't do Display though, you'd need to run say vnc or run Cycles from the command line. [1] https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/cycles/gpu_rendering.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/cycles/gpu_ren...
- tomovo 10y ago
  My iMac 2011 doesn't work with GPU Cycles but that's OK. And I've successfuly boosted render times by renting the multicore VPS by the hour already (commandline, specify different frame range on each machine to render).
  - tech_man7 10y ago
    You might want to check out Golem (https://golem.network/ https://golem.network/). They're working on very cheap Blender rendering. They're on Slack: http://golemproject.org:3000/ http://golemproject.org:3000/
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

seangrogg 10y ago

Out of curiosity, are there strong reasons to leverage GPUs in standard web application development from a general-purpose standpoint? Can I leverage this to enhance a general-purpose server or database? If so, anywhere I can read more? Always interested in what kinds of things one can do when new offerings like this are made.

user5994461 10y ago
GPU have no application whatsover for the usual web applications.
wmf 10y ago
Besides 3D graphics and machine learning, GPUs are also good for image resizing/encoding and video encoding/transcoding. But I haven't heard of anyone trying to accelerate Node.js or MongoDB on GPUs.
yeukhon 10y ago
Short answer: no. Long answer: if and only if you can really parallelize your processing into very small calculation each doesn't take a lot of memory, and you have a lot of time of writing special code using special framework. Perhaps streaming encoding in real time could be one, but that's already sort of beyond general web application. GPU is powerful because a GPU usually has 100+ cores. Each core is weak and inefficient, but power adds up when you have 100+ cores available. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_graphics_processing_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_g...
- arnon 10y ago
  GPUs have over 3000 cores nowadays (http://images.nvidia.com/content/tesla/pdf/nvidia-tesla-p100-PCIe-datasheet.pdf http://images.nvidia.com/content/tesla/pdf/nvidia-tesla-p100...)
tmostak 10y ago
You can run MapD (https://www.mapd.com https://www.mapd.com) and get big speedups over CPU analytic databases (http://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html http://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html). We'll be launching on Google Cloud soon.

porker 10y ago

Hopefully soon someone will create a GCE image for WebPageTest. It's been a pig to get up and running, but Amazon's per-hour billing is expensive for a machine needed 10-15 minutes every hour.

theDoug 10y ago
(I work at Google, I have my biases, but…) You might find good fun with our Preemptible VMs, which I think will land about ~$7/month: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible
- luka-birsa 10y ago
  Preemptible VMs + Kubernetes = Awesome. If you manage to build you app/infrastructure in away that can survive nodes shutting down at random times (or if you don't care about restarts) then you can reduce your infra costs for 80%. We have a staging cluster running on preemptive instances and as soon as one instance goes away we get a different one. Everything gets deployed automatically. Regular internal users checking out various webpages don't even notice. We're looking into changing our 24/7 infra (which needs to be 24/7) to something that can be run mostly on preemptive (with a couple of normal instances for services that can't be randomly killed). Super happy about our move to GCP and our K8S experience.
discodave 10y ago
AWS CodeBuild now gives you per minute billing. But it has limited instance types.
- porker 10y ago
  Unfortunately CodeBuild looks to be build only, not install a full software suite on the machine and run it. Otherwise, if it'd load an AMI - ideal!

ortekk 10y ago

Out of curiosity, can you... run video games with it?

curuinor 10y ago
... if you can deal with the 250-2000ms display lag sure and you have to use a remote windowing dealie
- wickedlogic 10y ago
  Is that number based on your experience using it this way with something like RDP/TurboVNC, or anecdotal based on other cloud providerS?
  - curuinor 10y ago
    I tried with AWS GPU once and only once. Probably if you spend time and effort you can get it down a fair bit
    - NegatioN 10y ago
      From my experience, network in GCE is way more stable and usable than it's AWS counterpart. So maybe we can see another OnLive rise again ;) (I'm joking, but there has to be a day when it's possible, right?)
- boulos 10y ago
  I'm only 23ms from us-west1. See my other note about OpenGL/DirectX right now, but you shouldn't assume anything like those round-trip times...
- mullen 10y ago
  Don't use Wi-Fi. My lag was 300ms from my desktop to US-West-2 and then I used an ethernet cable and it dropped to 30ms.
  - 10y ago

8166284 10y ago

Does anyone else find it kind of odd that Google, a company famous for having no human support at all anywhere who shuts down any attempts at contacting a human within its ranks for support on ANY of their products or services, always seems to deploy a small army of senior tech people to answer questions every time there is an article posted on HN. Strange double standards afoot, some users matter, others not so much.

throwaway2048 10y ago
Users that (potentially) fork over kilowads of cash have a way of attracting special attention.
- jpatokal 10y ago
  0.15 kilowad/mo is sufficient: https://cloud.google.com/support/ https://cloud.google.com/support/
fixermark 10y ago
How do you distinguish Google intentionally deploying senior tech people to HN from Google just having a lot of senior tech people who read HN? ;)
- theDoug 10y ago
  Yeah, the latter is literally the case. No one is 'deployed' anywhere, and it's a little amusing to think that we have "no support," but would deploy people to web forums, when looking to promote a commercial business. (We have support, more than 600 security engineers alone, we just offer commercial support for a commercial product.)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
boulos 10y ago
For what it's worth, I'm not "deployed" here. And as I've said on this forum numerous times: we offer real, paid support for Google Cloud.

minimaxir 10y ago

Looking at the docs, it appears that the CUDA drivers have to be manually installed on the host image, which takes time/money. Is there a GCP Image with CUDA drivers pre-installed? Or is that not possible with the hardware architecture?

boulos 10y ago
SIGH. Because GPL you can't pre-install the NVIDIA driver. At that point, it sadly makes more sense to have you roll your own and then bake the image. I'll gladly hand out refunds for the X minutes this takes (don't forget that on kernel upgrades you get to do it again when the kernel headers change!), but like you I wish it weren't so.
- moonbug22 10y ago
  Feed the installer the right flags and it will run unattended. install Dkms and it'll rebuild automatically on kernel updates
  - boulos 10y ago
    Yes, that's correct. But, you still must have the user do so. Otherwise, you're distributing the resulting artifact (the Nvidia driver linked against the kernel) which is GPL (kernel) and not (NVIDIA). But IANAL.
arnon 10y ago
Amazon Linux AMI for their GPU instances also does not include the CUDA driver.
- gigatexal 10y ago
  Just run a cuda container.
  - AlexCoventry 10y ago
    Can you point to an example of this? I have been installing nvidia-docker, and it sounds like what you're proposing is substantially simpler.

diamonis 10y ago

O/T I guess...Does Google have plans for FPGA instances preferably with design tools (for $.70 an hour :) !)?

tomarshubham24 10y ago

AWS has spot instances which are roughly ~1/10th the price of the regular EC2 instances. Anything equivalent here?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
wsh91 10y ago
There are discounts if your instances can be pre-empted: https://cloud.google.com/preemptible-vms/ https://cloud.google.com/preemptible-vms/. The pricing isn't variable like EC2 spot instances, however.
- vgt 10y ago
  Time for me to shamelessly plug my TL;DR blog on Google's Preemptible VMs: https://medium.com/@thetinot/google-clouds-spot-instances-win-big-and-you-should-too-5b244ca3facf https://medium.com/@thetinot/google-clouds-spot-instances-wi...
- candiodari 10y ago
  From the site: > You cannot attach GPUs to preemptible instances. GPUs do not receive sustained use discounts. So sorry, no.
  - wsh91 10y ago
    The question didn't even mention GPUs, and there's no reason that what you mention can't change in the future. It was a pointer.

arnon 10y ago

Are the cards physically in the same machine, or are they in a remote chassis and connected through the network? I think on P2, Amazon's cards are remote, and there is pretty significant latency when using them for time-sensitive computing. What kind of performance can we expect from GCP compared to AWS P2?

1024core 10y ago
The "Restrictions" section may answer some of your questions: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/gpus/ https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/gpus/
thesandlord 10y ago
They are connected directly to the host with PCIe, so you should get "bare metal" performance.
- arnon 10y ago
  I've heard that before. I'll believe it when I see it :)
  - thesandlord 10y ago
    Anyone can try it today :) I'd love to see your findings, I'm curious as well!

bsaul 10y ago

A bit off topic, but i recently realized how much the cost per cpu is really competitive in cloud offerings compared to reserved instances in regular hosting providers, but the network costs are absolutely outrageous. Cpu costs may be something 5 to 10 times more expensive in the cloud, but network are close to 100 times. Any hosting provider will offer you a 250 mbps unlimited network access for your macine, whereas consumming that much bandwidth in google cloud for a month will cost you more than 1000$. How come is the difference that big ?

mastazi 10y ago
> the cost per cpu is really competitive in cloud offerings > Cpu costs may be something 5 to 10 times more expensive in the cloud So are CPUs more or less expensive in the cloud? Also I assume by "cloud offerings" you mean AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and the like, and by "regular hosting providers" you mean GoDaddy, BlueHost and the like? Or perhaps you mean Paas vs Saas offerings?
- hyperknot 10y ago
  I believe he means OVH (+Kimsufi, Soyoustart), Online.net, and Hetzner for example. If you are interested in what 1/100th of AWS price looks, have a look at Online's server order page for example [1]. [1] https://console.online.net/en/order/server https://console.online.net/en/order/server
  - gorodetsky 10y ago
    Yes and no: yes you can get a Quad-Core 64GB RAM + SSD server for $55/month (source: https://www.hetzner.de/de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex51ssd https://www.hetzner.de/de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex51ss...). But there's one more spec that matters: networking. It takes completely different amount of effort to provide 1Gbps connectivity versus 40Gbps per server. Most of the providers like Hetzner/OVH provide former, while GCE provides the latter. I'm not saying it's bad, in fact for most of the people 1Gbps would be more than enough. But it's not something that is fair to omit. Disclaimer: I don't work for Google, just from my experience.

danjoc 10y ago

What happened to TPUs? http://austriantribune.com/informationen/165669-googles-new-tpu-accelerator-chip-speeds-machine-learning-systems http://austriantribune.com/informationen/165669-googles-new-...

frankchn 10y ago
TPUs are for Tensorflow-based computation only, rather than being generally CUDA compatible so they can run everything from Deep Learning to fluid dynamics simulations. I believe they are also for Google internal applications right now, so not generally available.

rahimnathwani 10y ago

I know it's early, but has anyone tried using one of these instead of the AWS p2.xlarge recommended for use in http://course.fast.ai/ http://course.fast.ai/ ?

wiradikusuma 10y ago

Sigh. When I first use Google cloud (lowercase c), it was only App Engine (CMIIW). I woke up one day, now it has more than a dozen offerings, confusing like AWS. Does anyone have, specifically for AI/ML, a list of "If you want to do X, use Y" for Google Cloud offerings? The official list (https://cloud.google.com/products/machine-learning/ https://cloud.google.com/products/machine-learning/) doesn't help much. Would appreciate if it's explained by layer (higher such as ready-to-use Speech Recognition and lower where you possibly need to setup some infra stuff). EDIT: I'm looking something like this (explains AWS offering by layer) but for Google -> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/ai/welcome-to-the-new-aws-ai-blog/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/ai/welcome-to-the-new-aws-ai-bl...

vgt 10y ago
Try this: https://hackernoon.com/what-are-the-google-cloud-platform-gcp-services-285f1988957a#.jyn2n8l1s https://hackernoon.com/what-are-the-google-cloud-platform-gc... Or for the really lazy: https://twitter.com/gregsramblings/status/832223967096090624/photo/1 https://twitter.com/gregsramblings/status/832223967096090624...