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New EC2 Instance Type - The Cluster GPU Instance
- tomjen3 16y agoMan thats a beast of a machine - each of the CPUs have 8b of cache, not to mention that you get a terra flop of double precision. Now if only I had some use for this :( (inspiration welcome, I am writing about GPU programming right now).
- mohawk 16y agoMolecular dynamics, quantum chemistry?
- shogunmike 16y agoThe sky is your limit for inspiration. Check out the applications section of the Wikipedia GPGPU page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPGPU#Applications http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPGPU#Applications
- samratjp 16y agoIf you really want to donate, there's always folding@home. Of course, a render farm can do the trick too if want purrty ray tracing? Look into Blender.
- ntoshev 16y agoMachine learning? Implement pagerank or SVMs on CUDA :) What is the mapreduce of CUDA going to be?
- perssontm 16y agoAmazon are really pushing the boundaries in the vm area, and also making it easily available and quite affordable as well. It seems like they will never turn evil, but most big companies do, or perhaps they are just hiding it very well. ;)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- StavrosK 16y agoIt's easier to keep honest when your business model is "provide great service for a good price".
- bartman 16y agoThese machines hold their promises, they are extremely fast, the networking between the instances in fast, as is their connection to the outside world. I'm eager to see what people do with these. And the pricing... to quote from the other article[1] on the GPU instances that's on the front page right now: "An 8 TeraFLOPS HPC cluster of GPU-enabled nodes will now only cost you about $17 per hour." [1] http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/11/cluster_gpu_instances_amazon_ec2.html http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/11/cluster_gpu_inst...
- bigiain 16y ago"I'm eager to see what people do with these." Is anybody else thinking "custom built rainbow tables for any algorithm you like, delivered directly into your S3 bucket in under 1 hour for $25"? (I wonder how much this means I should up the bcrypt workfactor to keep my password hashes secure from typical website crackers?)
- binomial 16y agoWell, rainbow tables are defeated with salt. I wouldn't worry about that if you're salting. And you are salting, right?
- AngryParsley 16y agoThis is cool, but you know what would be even cooler? Instances with SSD storage. It's so annoying to have database queries run an order of magnitude faster on my MacBook Air than on a cloud server. I don't know of any major provider that offers SSD instances. It really is an untapped market.
- flyt 16y agoGive it time. SSD's are entirely too expensive today for this kind of deployment.
- haribilalic 16y agoWhy can't they offer SSD instances at a higher price than non-SSD instances? Those that want or need the extra performance can pay for it just as they're paying for other niche instances already.
- mrb 16y agoSSDs are cheap in terms of $/IOPS. In fact they are about a hundred times cheaper than HDDs (Crucial C300 128GB: $250 for 50k IOPS vs. entry-level 7200RPM HDD: $60 for 120 IOPS or so). People, stop assuming that $/GB is the only metric that matters.
- wwortiz 16y agoI wonder if $/GB matters when people are selling VMs (like say linode), I don't know how many Virtual Machines are put into one server but if you are doing 16gb per VM and depending on the RAID usage as well it might start to add up. I also don't know if this is still a problem but there was a worry about limited writes on SSDs and if normal harddrive lifetimes are greater than that of an SSD by a significant amount I could see why it would be a problem.
- PStamatiou 16y agoIt's coming.. http://gigaom.com/2010/06/23/jungledisk-founder-launches-new-startup-solidfire/ http://gigaom.com/2010/06/23/jungledisk-founder-launches-new...
- matclayton 16y agoLooks like the Tidepowerd beta came out with perfect timing, must give this a spin http://www.tidepowerd.com/ http://www.tidepowerd.com/ compile .net code to gpu. P.s. Disclaimer, they are friends of mine, the beta is pretty epic!
- petercooper 16y agoIt's not exactly an apples for apples comparison, but with your 8 instances rocking 2 * 515Gflops of GPU each, you get just over 8Tflops. Looking back at the TOP500 lists, this "peak" value would have got you into the top 15 supercomputers in 2003. (Looking back further, you'd be vying for a top 5 spot in mid 2002..) The more depressing observation is that 33.5ECUs are equivalent to 8 cores @ 2.93GHz on Intel's recent architecture. This means your typical "small" EC2 instance with 1 ECU is on a par with ~700MHz of a single modern Intel core. (Highly unscientific but an interesting ballpark.)
- haribilalic 16y agoThis means your typical "small" EC2 instance with 1 ECU is on a par with ~700MHz of a single modern Intel core. Amazon says that "one EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor"[1]. [1] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
- chesser 16y agoGP: > > The more depressing observation is that 33.5ECUs are equivalent to 8 cores @ 2.93GHz You said: > I don't know where you got 700 MHz from, because by my math, it'd be equivalent to a 1.43 GHz Nehalem core (33.5 / 8 * 2.93) Transposed. >>> 8*2.93/33.5 0.69970149253731351 8 cores at 2.93 GHz is 23.44 GHz, which means one compute unit is 700 MHz. A modern processor can do more per clock than an older processor. In addition, it has a larger cache, faster cache, and a faster memory bus, although on the flip side the memory bus is being shared between more CPUs.
- eliben 16y agoBooks from 20 years ago already advised to stop using FLOPs as an estimate of computational power. And for a good reason. I know you admitted it's not a fair comparison, but statements like this help marketing departments to do their job convincing the masses of "facts" that are highly unscientific.
- petercooper 16y ago
- mrb 16y agoAmazon is expanding their EC2 feature set so rapidly... The pace is mind blowing to me. Last year, Randy Bias estimated EC2 was pulling $220M revenue/yr: http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/amazons-ec2-generating-220m-annually http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/amazons-ec2-gen... And he estimated an overly conservative 10-20% annual growth. But given the EC2 buzz this year, and personal anecdotes from my friends and colleagues using it, my gut feeling tells me the 2010 revenues will have increased 50-100% over 2009 revenues. Is EC2 profitable to Amazon? Likely very profitable if you want my opinion. It is well accepted in the industry that the dominant cost in large scale datacenters is power and cooling --not hardware, not human resources-- and I keep running numbers in my head and the hourly prices of all instance types are well above power & cooling. Just as an example, we know that this new GPU instance has two 95W Xeon X5570 and two 247W Tesla M2050; assuming (1) a max TDP of 50W for the motherboard and rest of the server, (2) instances are run under full load 100% of the time and always reach these max TDP numbers (unlikely, but follow me for the sake of the argument), (3) Amazon uses servers with 80PLUS power supplies (80% efficient or more), (4) a rather good datacenter with a PUE of 1.3 (power usage effectiveness, which includes overhead from power distribution and cooling; numbers in the range of 1.2-1.4 are often quoted by James Hamilton from the AWS team: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/ http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/), and (5) electricity costs of $0.10/kWh (average in the US, but I know Amazon datacenters are in locations with cheaper electricity), then the hourly power and cooling costs would be: (95*2 + 50 + 247*2) / 0.8 * 1.3 / 1000 * 0.10 = $0.119/hr Amazon charges 17x this amount for on-demand instances ($2.10/hr), and 6x this amount for reserved instances ($0.74/hr). Given these numbers, Amazon must recoup the initial deployment costs very, very quickly... Which is why I also think EC2 must be very profitable.
- samratjp 16y agoYup, they're supposed to make twice as much this year - http://venturebeat.com/2010/08/03/amazon-web-services-generating-an-estimated-500m-in-revenue-thanks-in-part-to-growth-of-social-games/ http://venturebeat.com/2010/08/03/amazon-web-services-genera...
- anarchitect 16y agoAt an Amazon Tech Summit I was at in London this month, it was mentioned that Jeff Bezos expects AWS to eventually exceed the profits they make from retail.
- tszming 16y agoSeems this is dedicated server technology, not virtualization, except we can boot up the server using API?
- timf 16y agoCheck out the extensive benchmarks here: http://blog.cyclecomputing.com/2010/11/a-couple-more-nails-in-the-coffin-of-the-private-compute-cluster-gpu-on-cloud.html http://blog.cyclecomputing.com/2010/11/a-couple-more-nails-i... (HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1906452 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1906452 )
- ithkuil 16y agodoes anybody know GPU instances can be of any aid for building full text indices (inverted lists) or other non-floating point workfloads ? I was skimming through the title of a recent paper presenting an sorting algorithm exploiting GPUs, but still I'm in the mental model of treating GPU workloads as having to do with floating point operations.
- mzl 16y agoI'm not a GPGPU expert, but one thing that is easy to forget is that floating point types have a well-functioning integer subset. For example, on 32-bit computers it can be beneficial to use 64-bit doubles for extended precision in integer calculations. That said, when I've looked into potentially using GPGPU, the problem has been that branchy code is not a good fit.
- jra101 16y agoModern GPUs do have a full set of integer instructions, they just don't run as fast as floating point instructions. Depending on how well a problem maps to the massively parallel architecture of a GPU, this may not matter.
- mrb 16y agoThis is wrong. The rate of integer and logical instructions that can be run per clock is equal to or higher than floating point instructions. For example, AMD GPUs 5-way VLIW units can execute, per clock: 5 integer/logical op, or 5 single precision flop, or 1 double precision flop. Nvidia GT200 GPU streaming processors can execute, per (shader) clock: 1 integer/logical op, or 1 single precision flop, or 0.5 double precision flop.
- wmf 16y agoThere's a little work in this area, but it looks like people have just scratched the surface. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1149800 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1149800
- athst 16y agoWow! Amazon is absolutely killing it. I wonder if this will be the inflection point when GPU computing really takes off.