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It really depends on the workload. GPU clusters are usually cheaper to run in house since Nvidia let you use regular GPUs for research which end up cheaper than

It really depends on the workload. GPU clusters are usually cheaper to run in house since Nvidia let you use regular GPUs for research which end up cheaper than cloud GPUs. And often Universities will charge less overhead for capital expenses on a grant which can artificially reduce the cost of running it yourself. The big downside of institutional HPC is it can be difficult to get stuff running on the ancient distributions they're stuck on. Nowadays perhaps Docker makes things easier but even running a Docker container was a challenge when I worked at a university some 5-10 years ago. As a software engineer who had not used HPC previously I found it much more difficult than just firing up jobs on AWS which had documentation (though for many researchers it was the opposite.) I also kind of object to the term HPC... with the exception of a small number of shared memory clusters used for physics simulations they're usually just a bunch of standard servers often with incredibly slow network storage. Nothing high performance about them.

nix23 4y ago
>since Nvidia let you use regular GPUs for research which end up cheaper than cloud GPUs. Funfact, that's illegal in Europe, producers have no right to tell you what to do with their products and your property.
- laurencerowe 4y ago
  While you own the hardware you don't own the software necessary to make use of it, just a license.
  - nix23 4y ago
    Yes and? Most US TOS's are illegal in the EU anyway. Cant make money with your Gamer-Card? Well then all let's players on youtube have a problem.
- NavinF 4y ago
  I swear, every thread has at least one European bragging about something ridiculous like "fun fact, murder is illegal in Europe" without spending 10 seconds to check if it's also illegal in the US. Yes, we have property rights in the US. No, it's not obvious whether buying the hardware also gives you a license to use Nvidia's CUDA libraries without any limitations. Nobody has tested this in court. Personally, I've got many consumer GPUs in my data center. If Nvidia doesn't like that, they can sue me. Username is real name.
  - nix23 4y ago
- Dah00n 4y ago
  Is it really though? The biggest country in Europe is Russia, also the biggest population is Russians living inside Russia. Maybe you meant the EU which is far from being all of Europe. It is not even half of Europe. There are 23 countries out of 44 in Europe that aren't in the EU. If you talk law then a small detail like that matters a lot.
  - nix23 4y ago
    >The biggest country in Europe is Russia Just a part of russia is europe...being as pedantic as you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural_Mountains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural_Mountains
    - thelastgallon 4y ago
      European Russia accounts for about 75% of Russia's total population. It covers an area of over 3,995,200 square kilometres (1,542,600 sq mi), with a population of nearly 110 million—making Russia the largest and most populous country in Europe. European Russia covers the vast majority of Eastern Europe, and spans roughly 40% of Europe's total landmass, with over 15% of its total population, making Russia the largest and most populous country in Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Russia
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
j33zusjuice 4y ago
> I also kind of object to the term HPC... with the exception of a small number of shared memory clusters used for physics simulations they're usually just a bunch of standard servers often with incredibly slow network storage. Nothing high performance about them. I’m sure there are plenty of places who have production clusters equivalent to our “test cluster” that we ran in VMWare (which we only used to check version compatibility during upgrades), but in my experience working on an HPC team at a research university is that most universities are using real HPC clusters. They’re not all equally built and managed, but they have 50+ compute nodes using Infiniband (or equivalent) for interconnectivity between nodes, and to connect to the back end SAN, which runs a distributed, parallel file system (usually GPFS, sometimes Lustre, or BeeGFS). Apptainer (formerly Singularity) is aimed at containerizing HPC workloads. You can build it with Docker commands, and then convert to Apptainer’s format, so it’s pretty easy to use. You don’t run Docker directly, in any case. Correct that compatibility is a huge issue. It got ugly at the end of our EL6 cluster’s life. It didn’t run containers well, and our cluster was so entrenched in the old way of managing software (modules and Conda envs) that converting would have been a massive effort, and it may not have worked at all! There was a lot that had to get rescheduled or find a different place to run while we dealt with supply chain slowness.

nix23 4y ago

>since Nvidia let you use regular GPUs for research which end up cheaper than cloud GPUs. Funfact, that's illegal in Europe, producers have no right to tell you what to do with their products and your property.

laurencerowe 4y ago
While you own the hardware you don't own the software necessary to make use of it, just a license.
- nix23 4y ago
  Yes and? Most US TOS's are illegal in the EU anyway. Cant make money with your Gamer-Card? Well then all let's players on youtube have a problem.
NavinF 4y ago
I swear, every thread has at least one European bragging about something ridiculous like "fun fact, murder is illegal in Europe" without spending 10 seconds to check if it's also illegal in the US. Yes, we have property rights in the US. No, it's not obvious whether buying the hardware also gives you a license to use Nvidia's CUDA libraries without any limitations. Nobody has tested this in court. Personally, I've got many consumer GPUs in my data center. If Nvidia doesn't like that, they can sue me. Username is real name.
- nix23 4y ago
Dah00n 4y ago
Is it really though? The biggest country in Europe is Russia, also the biggest population is Russians living inside Russia. Maybe you meant the EU which is far from being all of Europe. It is not even half of Europe. There are 23 countries out of 44 in Europe that aren't in the EU. If you talk law then a small detail like that matters a lot.
- nix23 4y ago
  >The biggest country in Europe is Russia Just a part of russia is europe...being as pedantic as you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural_Mountains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural_Mountains
  - thelastgallon 4y ago
    European Russia accounts for about 75% of Russia's total population. It covers an area of over 3,995,200 square kilometres (1,542,600 sq mi), with a population of nearly 110 million—making Russia the largest and most populous country in Europe. European Russia covers the vast majority of Eastern Europe, and spans roughly 40% of Europe's total landmass, with over 15% of its total population, making Russia the largest and most populous country in Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Russia
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

j33zusjuice 4y ago

> I also kind of object to the term HPC... with the exception of a small number of shared memory clusters used for physics simulations they're usually just a bunch of standard servers often with incredibly slow network storage. Nothing high performance about them. I’m sure there are plenty of places who have production clusters equivalent to our “test cluster” that we ran in VMWare (which we only used to check version compatibility during upgrades), but in my experience working on an HPC team at a research university is that most universities are using real HPC clusters. They’re not all equally built and managed, but they have 50+ compute nodes using Infiniband (or equivalent) for interconnectivity between nodes, and to connect to the back end SAN, which runs a distributed, parallel file system (usually GPFS, sometimes Lustre, or BeeGFS). Apptainer (formerly Singularity) is aimed at containerizing HPC workloads. You can build it with Docker commands, and then convert to Apptainer’s format, so it’s pretty easy to use. You don’t run Docker directly, in any case. Correct that compatibility is a huge issue. It got ugly at the end of our EL6 cluster’s life. It didn’t run containers well, and our cluster was so entrenched in the old way of managing software (modules and Conda envs) that converting would have been a massive effort, and it may not have worked at all! There was a lot that had to get rescheduled or find a different place to run while we dealt with supply chain slowness.