
Next-Generation GPU-Powered EC2 Instances (G3) - janober
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-next-generation-gpu-powered-ec2-instances-g3/
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lars
They say "next-generation", but these are M60 GPUs, which are very much
"previous-generation". Current generation would be P100 GPUs.

I am in the market for a cloud GPU offering, and I have to say the big cloud
providers are very uncompetitive here, only offering these old, slow GPUs.

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moonbug22
The g2s were Kepler, the g3s are Maxwell. 'Next generation' is technically
correct.

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TotallyHuman
Current gen is Pascal though, so 'Prev generation' is more correct.

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moonbug22
In architectural terms perhaps. But the M60 is most definitely a current
generation Tesla product.

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bbgm
These are G-instances and graphics is one of the primary use cases for this
instance (and for the previous G2 instance). The M60 is the top part with GRID
support built in. A GRID license that allows you to use the GRID driver is
part of the offering.

Disclosure: I own HPC for AWS (among other things) and used to own instances

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marklit
Anyone care to chime in on why spot instances are now 10x on-demand instances?
I've got a thread going here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14769026](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14769026)

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moonbug22
That happens not infrequently. 1#x ondemand is the ceiling bid for spots. It's
the result of a bid war amongst two or more big customers who really don't
want to be evicted.

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girvo
Lol we don't even have the P instances in Sydney yet, so I'm not holding my
breath here.

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nl
Under what circumstances do you care about the location?

When I'm using cloud GPUs it's pretty much a batch job, and latency is the
last thing I care about.

I'm not aware of any DL projects in Australia on health images which may have
some legislative requirements about keeping data onshore.

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alexcnwy
Data transfer between EC2 and S3 in the same region is free but incurs costs
between regions.

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dkobran
If you want some current generation GPUs ;) check out
[https://paperspace.com](https://paperspace.com)

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floatboth
Once again, no instances with multiple powerful GPUs and like 1-2 CPU cores
and 1GB RAM… Not doing them to discourage mining? :D

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moonbug22
Far from it. For a long period the floor spot price of aws gpu instances
tracked the bitcoin mining positive roi threshold.

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bryanlarsen
Sad to see no fractional-GPU instances. A 4xlarge is massive overkill and
unaffordable for our use case.

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sp332
-

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moonbug22
So?

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amq
> up to 18 H.264 1080p30 streams

How is the quality compared to x264 with the default settings (preset medium,
crf 23)?

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Scaevolus
A lot worse, but your CPU doesn't take a hit. NVENC doesn't have very good
quality at low bitrates, but it's fine for local recording (1080p@15Mbps+)
that will be transcoded later.

Here's a comparison video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV5btdqQfu4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV5btdqQfu4)

According to this it's _almost_ equivalent when you compare 720p@5Mbps and
1080p@12Mbps, which is _way_ more than most streaming sites will do:
[http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2014/presentations/S464...](http://on-
demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2014/presentations/S4646-high-performance-video-
encoding-gpus.pdf)

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horusthecat
I'm taking this and Nvidia's announcement it was going to sell a mining-
oriented GPU as the shot over the bow for cryptocoins. But then again, only
market-makers get rich calling a top.

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swiley
Has anyone done much Linux gaming on EC2? I want to be able to play xonotic
again but I don't play it often enough to justify buying a high power desktop.

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_neil
I did some mac gaming on it. Not terrible for certain games. I was mainly
playing Rocket League multiplayer. There's a bunch of resources/experiences at
[https://www.reddit.com/r/cloudygamer/](https://www.reddit.com/r/cloudygamer/)

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mankoxyz
Is it profitable to use these for mining cryptocurrency?

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dkersten
No. Nowadays the big players in mining cryptocurrency have datacenters full of
ASIC's. The currencies that are resistant to ASIC mining (due to eg using
memory-bound hashing functions), like Monero, are probably just as resistant
to GPU mining as they are to ASIC mining, although if you were to investigate
it, I'd look at one of those and not bitcoin.

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jnwatson
No. Making a GPU resistant algorithm is hard. Ethereum is ASIC but not GPU
resistant.

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dkersten
Why is that? I understand that GPU's have a ton more memory than an ASIC, but
couldn't you attach a huge amount of RAM or something to your ASIC (kinda like
how GPU's work)?

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imtringued
Those ASICs will cost as much as GPUs or more for the same amount of
performance.

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dkersten
Thanks!

Although, since an ASIC is application specific, couldn't you pack more cores
(since you can ignore the circuitry that you don't need) or otherwise optimise
for the application? If you can do more work, or do the same amount of work
with less energy, then it could still be worth it.

I am obviously ignoring a rather important factor: its unlikely a "small"
player could make a more performant ASIC than a "big" player like the GPU
vendors, who have invested billions into building high performance hardware in
a cost effective way. I'm not really asking "why don't people do this", but
rather asking if its possible at all given a big enough budget.

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phreeza
Does anyone know what the difference between G and P is supposed to be,
conceptually?

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piqufoh
P are intended for general-purpose GPU compute applications (and have 1, 8 or
16 GPUs, more RAM and fewer CPUs). Typically you might use these for
scientific computing / machine learning / anything CUDA intensive.

G are optimized for graphics-intensive applications (and have 1, 2 or 4 GPUs,
less RAM and more CPUs) - you might use these for design work, gaming etc.

