

Ask HN: Cheapest option to colo a GPU compute box? - SeckinJohn

Hi everyone,
We need to build a GPU compute box (thinking GeForce GTX Titan Black[$1000] as the GPU) for training Convolutional Neural Networks and building services on top of the trained model. What would be the most cost effective way to colo such a server?
Hurricane Electric told us a 2U rack space (100mbit and 750W) would cost us $700&#x2F;month and I find that a little too expensive.(they are saying that we would rent a whole cabinet for the same price since their main cost is going to be our power usage and not bandwidth etc)<p>I am also thinking of building the box on my own and putting it in our office in SF (which has a static ip and 50mbit unlimited internet) but that&#x27;d probably violate the TOS - and even if it doesn&#x27;t I am not sure if the internet connection would be stable enough to operate such a service from (though it doesn&#x27;t necessarily need to be real-real-time -- we just the box to consume our job queue and a 1 minute delay would be acceptable there)<p>What are your thoughts on this? Do we really have to come to terms with having to pay $700+&#x2F;mo for this?<p>(somehow arranging this for ~$300&#x2F;mo would be amazing)
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mattbillenstein
I'd stick it in your office - $300/mo is still $3600/yr...

Other option I'd look at is spot gpu instances on aws - then it's hosted and
you don't buy anything - and potentially you could shut it down part of the
time although you're charged a full hour for each partial hour...

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mithras
I don't know about AWS for this use case, if you use it more than 50% of the
time I'm sure costs will be much much higher.

~~~
SeckinJohn
Actually he is right - gpu instances are pretty cheap if you use the spot
ones.
[http://ec2price.com/?product=Linux/UNIX&type=g2.2xlarge&regi...](http://ec2price.com/?product=Linux/UNIX&type=g2.2xlarge&region=us-
west-1&window=60)

But the thing is I am not sure if amazon keeps a spot-instance reserve (i.e.
what happens if all the spot instances get turned into on-demand ones over,
say, a month and suddenly your service is shut down and you keep waiting
indefinitely[you'd probably wait for around 24 hours and then try to get an
on-demand one - which is 11x more expensive, costing around $600/mo for a
shared gpu. and if you can't find an on-demand one, you will be offline for
around a week until you figure out a way of provisioning a gpu instance from
another service provider, which will probably cost you a lot more, but at that
point you will have to do it not to disrupt the service for so long])

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walterbell
How about sonic.net business class symmetric DSL which permits servers,
[http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-26/sonic-dot-
ne...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-26/sonic-dot-net-the-good-
isp-that-tech-geeks-prefer-over-the-big-boys)

~~~
SeckinJohn
Thanks, this looks great. Apparently they also have colocation space -- asked
them how much it'd cost us. Will post here once I hear back(if I hear back
soon :) ).

