
Bare Metal Solution: Enabling Specialized Workloads in Google Cloud - bretpiatt
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/bare-metal-solution-enabling-specialized-workloads-in-google-cloud
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devicetray0
This is essentially just a co-located box, that you connect to your virtual
network over a VPN/interconnect. Why is it not inside the virtual network? Why
is the pricing hidden behind a sales person? That seems like the first cloud
instance to have hidden pricing...

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wmf
Given the vagueness of the announcement, one may wonder if it's custom
consulting masquerading as a product.

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GuyOnMySpace
They don't call it out in the announcement, but this was published in the same
week as the "Supercomputing" conference - GCP hasn't had an answer for HPC
workloads thus far, so maybe this is their attempt.

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gnufx
It's not a proper answer for HPC without an actual low-latency low-contention
RDMA fabric. Typical HPC systems have a large fraction of materials science
computation that really needs it. There's an example of scaling cp2k (I think)
on Azure, but I've not used Azure to be able to say how well it works compared
with an actual HPC cluster where you can also monitor the fabric (which is
quite important).

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GuyOnMySpace
Fully agree, but the announcement is pretty bare-bones so no reason to think
that adding InfiniBand is totally out of the question, particularly since this
offering seems to be pretty far from a standard GCP experience.

Having experimented with IB on Azure, I can comfortably say that the problem
is not so much the fabric but the general usability of Azure itself - hot
garbage doesn't do it justice.

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tyingq
I wonder if it's competitive with Rackspace and similar, or if they are
charging a premium and/or things like egress.

