3 ms·

> Hardware is amortized over five years hardware running 100% won't last five years if hardware is not needed to be running 100% at full steam for five years,

> Hardware is amortized over five years hardware running 100% won't last five years if hardware is not needed to be running 100% at full steam for five years, you can turn down instances on the cloud and you don't pay anything in 2 years you'll be stuck with the same hardware, while on the cloud you follow cpu evolution as it arrives to the provider all in all the comparison is too high level to be useful

icedchai 4y ago
I think you underestimate how long modern hardware can last. I have 8 to 12 year old PCs running non-stop, in a musty and damp basement.
- avereveard 4y ago
  they don't just die, thermal paste dry up, fans gum up, gpu will live, but thermal throttling will mean it'll run at, say, 80%.
e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
> hardware running 100% won't last five years Five year is a pretty typical amortisation schedule for HPC hardware. During my sysadmin days, of CPU, memory, cooling, power, storage, and networking, the only things that broke were hard disks and a few cooling fans. Disks were replaced by just grabbing a space and slotting it in, and fans were replaced by, well, swapping them out. Modern CPUs and memory last a very long time. I think I remember seeing Ivy Bridge CPUs running in Hetzner servers in a video they put out, and they're still fine.
- avereveard 4y ago
  if you expect downtime in the 5 year to replace fan and whatnot, you're not getting 100% of your money/perf back - and I didn't see that in the article. if you have spares, spares need to be in the cost, and value lost to downtime stay minimal. but you have to include spares in the expenses. if you don't have spares, 1-2 day downtime is going to be a decent hit to value.
  - aflag 4y ago
    I think spot instances on amazon at least don't do partial hours, do they? So, you'll also have some wasted cycles there. Probably enough to compensate for your on-prem downtime.
  - davidmr 4y ago
    I’m not sure I understand what you mean. I’ve run HPC clusters for a long time now, and node failures are just a fact of life. If 3 or 4 nodes of your 500 node cluster are down for a few days while you wait for RMA parts to arrive, you haven’t lost much value. Your cluster is still functioning at nearly peak capacity. You have a handful of nodes that the cluster can’t function without (scheduler, fileservers, etc), but you buy spares and 24x7 contracts for those nodes. Did I misunderstand your comment?
aflag 4y ago
I've worked with a yarn cluster with around 200 nodes which ran non stop for well over 5 years and still kicking. There were a handful of failures and replacements, but I'd 95% of the cluster was fine 7 years in.

icedchai 4y ago

I think you underestimate how long modern hardware can last. I have 8 to 12 year old PCs running non-stop, in a musty and damp basement.

avereveard 4y ago
they don't just die, thermal paste dry up, fans gum up, gpu will live, but thermal throttling will mean it'll run at, say, 80%.

e63f67dd-065b 4y ago

> hardware running 100% won't last five years Five year is a pretty typical amortisation schedule for HPC hardware. During my sysadmin days, of CPU, memory, cooling, power, storage, and networking, the only things that broke were hard disks and a few cooling fans. Disks were replaced by just grabbing a space and slotting it in, and fans were replaced by, well, swapping them out. Modern CPUs and memory last a very long time. I think I remember seeing Ivy Bridge CPUs running in Hetzner servers in a video they put out, and they're still fine.

avereveard 4y ago
if you expect downtime in the 5 year to replace fan and whatnot, you're not getting 100% of your money/perf back - and I didn't see that in the article. if you have spares, spares need to be in the cost, and value lost to downtime stay minimal. but you have to include spares in the expenses. if you don't have spares, 1-2 day downtime is going to be a decent hit to value.
- aflag 4y ago
  I think spot instances on amazon at least don't do partial hours, do they? So, you'll also have some wasted cycles there. Probably enough to compensate for your on-prem downtime.
- davidmr 4y ago
  I’m not sure I understand what you mean. I’ve run HPC clusters for a long time now, and node failures are just a fact of life. If 3 or 4 nodes of your 500 node cluster are down for a few days while you wait for RMA parts to arrive, you haven’t lost much value. Your cluster is still functioning at nearly peak capacity. You have a handful of nodes that the cluster can’t function without (scheduler, fileservers, etc), but you buy spares and 24x7 contracts for those nodes. Did I misunderstand your comment?

aflag 4y ago

I've worked with a yarn cluster with around 200 nodes which ran non stop for well over 5 years and still kicking. There were a handful of failures and replacements, but I'd 95% of the cluster was fine 7 years in.