Adhoc Supercomputer in a Day

[rbarreira]

Obviously Amazon EC2 is not for people who want to sustain a cluster for several years. It's rather for people who want to use one from time to time without sinking in tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars in fixed capital that they barely use...

You could also show with calculations that it's not worth it to rent a car for the long-term, yet rent-a-car businesses are much used and appreciated by many people...

[diep]

I am not disputing you can get less $ per compute unit by rolling your own at home.

But you can't really expect Amazon to provide the same or better pricing than you'd get buying a used server off eBay and running it at home. They don't buy their servers on eBay and they don't run them in a garage.

That said, there are dedicated hosting providers that are cheaper than Amazon for high-end hardware used long-term.

--Jon

The amazon's price is factor 10 away from any realistic price.
Obviously ebay gets it cheaper than that factor 10 cheaper price.

You realize what FACTOR 10 means?

Those in need for crunching simply always need massive crunching.
Amazons can't deliver that simply at a decent price.

Also their fastest machines they rent for $5.8 a node roughly and their fastest machines are only 2 socket nodes.

So even a world champs that is over a period of 11 days, say you rent it for 2 weeks. That's 14 * 24 * $5.8 = $2k

And you have a low clocked i7 always so they really buy them in cheap.
Actually you do realize usually fastest Amazon's machines are simply free gifts they got for project X or project Y?

They rent to you something they got for free.

If you really want some crunching power we can PROVE that for any sort of serious workload you can't use Amazons, except when you're a total fool.

The amazon infrastructure is simply not suited for serious crunching.

Now if we speak about guys with too much cash for crunching that would be the financial world. However nearly all traders that need massive crunching they usually invest big sums into a particular market; as they're such specialists they also do that for others. That usually therefore involves pension funds and such. That's another range of secrecy contracts that involve banking secrecy.

Amazon can never deliver that nor garantuee and no one ever would go to jail at amazons stealing the most important secrets of todays society. Let alone they would be able to handle the huge bandwidth to each node of realtime data.

So that huge group we can directly exclude. The most lucrative group.

So all what's left for amazons is some civil servants who brag and claim things worked for them at amazons.

That's exactly the few i saw claiming that and it's always yanks you know.

A bunch of i7 machines they got from a Dutch charity organisation, to host some of the multi agent challenges, yet in reality they put those machines in USA not in Europe.

From European viewpoint seen Amazon's cloud computing is the most silliest thing to consider using. All the cloud services in most locations simply have been shut down or it's still machines from 10 years ago.

I don't know why the sponsoring of Amazons occured by this organisation, not even a single European guy ever profited from Amazon's infrastructure if you ask me.

The 'good deal claims' type 'i could rent it real cheap' seem to always go to vague US civil servants. Never to an European guy. Or they just simply lie.

If i look what's written on the homepage and what price it has, it's factor 10 over the top for machines they got for FREE.

[rbarreira]

Also their fastest machines they rent for $5.8 a node roughly and their fastest machines are only 2 socket nodes.

I don't see any machine selling for $5.8. Their biggest cluster compute instance is $2.4 per hour for Linux usage (2-node with a total of 16 cores, 2.6 GHz sandy bridge).

Even the GPU instances cost less than $5.8 so I can't figure out where you're getting that number.

Actually you do realize usually fastest Amazon's machines are simply free gifts they got for project X or project Y?

They rent to you something they got for free.

Even if that's true (and I doubt it), I don't see how that matters for anyone except Amazon. They offer a service for a price, how they deal with their suppliers is none of my business.

[diep]

Also their fastest machines they rent for $5.8 a node roughly and their fastest machines are only 2 socket nodes.

I don't see any machine selling for $5.8. Their biggest cluster compute instance is $2.4 per hour for Linux usage (2-node with a total of 16 cores, 2.6 GHz sandy bridge).

Even the GPU instances cost less than $5.8 so I can't figure out where you're getting that number.

Actually you do realize usually fastest Amazon's machines are simply free gifts they got for project X or project Y?

They rent to you something they got for free.

Even if that's true (and I doubt it), I don't see how that matters for anyone except Amazon. They offer a service for a price, how they deal with their suppliers is none of my business.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

You refer to this one?
"Eight Extra Large $2.400 per Hour"

You realize what '8 extra large' means?
That's an old Xeon man.

So in 50 hours on that box you already pay the price of what you can get an 8 core Xeon box for from ebay.

"Pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance, from the time an instance is launched until it is terminated. Each partial instance-hour consumed will be billed as a full hour. "

By the way:

Juridical spoken Amazon has 100 ways out to just deliver you 8 virtual cores of 1Ghz.

Because of this at least confusing sort of woollen political type language, indirectly saying what you get without direct relationship, meanwhile having the legal freedome to change definitions, no one who is sane deals with them hiring EC2's.

[rbarreira]

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

You refer to this one?
"Eight Extra Large $2.400 per Hour"

You realize what '8 extra large' means?
That's an old Xeon man.

You are wrong:

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large Instance

60.5 GB of memory
88 EC2 Compute Units (2 x Intel Xeon E5-2670, eight-core "Sandy Bridge" architecture)
3370 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: Very High (10 Gigabit Ethernet)

[diep]

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

You refer to this one?
"Eight Extra Large $2.400 per Hour"

You realize what '8 extra large' means?
That's an old Xeon man.

You are wrong:

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large Instance

60.5 GB of memory
88 EC2 Compute Units (2 x Intel Xeon E5-2670, eight-core "Sandy Bridge" architecture)
3370 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: Very High (10 Gigabit Ethernet)

Oh we see now how Amazon dicks everyone by calling that 88 EC2 compute equivalent.

16 cores * 2.6Ghz = 41.6Ghz and they call this 88 EC2.

So elsewhere if you rent this you pay for 88 EC2, in short you pay for every logical core the full price.

Seems they switched the Nehalems, which they got for free, which had a cost of $2.4 an hour now to the E5's.

So they have the juridical right to charge you:

So that's $2.4 * 88 = $211 an hour!

As there is no crystal clear statement you rent the entire box for that price, and elsewhere you have prices set by ec2 value and every price is an EC2 equivalent price.

So they can charge $211 an hour.

Of course this fishy way of not being juridical clear what they EXACTLY deliver to you, is why no one who is sane uses Amazons for this.

They have 100 juridical escape routes...

Speaking of fuzzy woollen language. It's not clear whether this is an 'spot' instance meaning that only if the 'capacity is unused' you are allowed to use it. In short they don't have a crystal clear statement that if you pay this amount of money that you actually GET it.

Only when it's 'free' seemingly.

In short i suspect some other organisation donated this hardware to them and that organisation sometimes needs to use it in which case you can't.

Look here their definition says they can charge it 88 times as it's defined as 88 times an EC2 :

"60.5 GB of memory
88 EC2 Compute Units (2 x Intel Xeon E5-2670, eight-core "Sandy Bridge" architecture)
3370 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: Very High (10 Gigabit Ethernet)
EBS-Optimized Available: No*
API name: cc2.8xlarge"

[rbarreira]

You know the time you spend writing your conspiracy-riddled posts? If you spent 10% of that time reading Amazon's EC2 site you'd know that you're just spreading misinformation. The EC2 compute counts are not directly linked to pricing.

[jdart]

Yeah, really their pricing is not that complicated. $211 per hour is in Vincent's head, not on their website.

--Jon

[diep]

Just summarize cloud computing of amazons:

a) they are too expensive
b) they have fuzzy type sorts of contracts that are hard to read online what you ACTUALLY get for your money
c) whatever calculation you do, it's really expensive.
At HPC centers here you can rent a dual socket node for 50 euro a week,
Whatever price calculation you do amazons is more expensive there.
d) it's trivial that amazons cloud computing is a big flop in terms of sales as they nowadays just work with hardware they got for free at a single datacenter in USA, whereas first they offered new hardware at many locations
e) juridical amazons has any right to do whatever, you don't have hard garantuees if you pay money for cloud computing
f) the only ones who have cash also usually have a security problem and amazons offers no hard garantuees there.

Where F is already to break any lucrative deal, the whole conclusion from cloud computing as a buzzword is that it's a big success and that amazons as a seller of computing time is a big flop.