
EC2 Instances with 6, 9, and 12 TB of Memory - jeffbarr
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-amazon-ec2-high-memory-instances-with-6-9-and-12-tb-of-memory-perfect-for-sap-hana/
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packetslave
Also gives you 224 physical CPU cores (448 logical cores).

Requires a 3-year reservation, and "the effective hourly rate for the All
Upfront 3-Year Reservation for a u-12tb1.metal Dedicated Host in the US East
(N. Virginia) Region is $30.539 per hour."

Works out to $267,512.88 per year, or $802,538.64 for the 3-year term. I
wonder how that compares to building your own on-premise host with that much
RAM (obviously, there's operational costs to consider as well).

Also, don't miss the last line: "We’re not stopping at 12 TiB, and are
planning to launch instances with 18 TiB and 24 TiB of memory in 2019."

~~~
nikkwong
Crazy. Is the use case for these types of instances pretty much designated for
ML? Why else would anyone need these?

~~~
abraham_lincoln
My redis is bigger than your redis?

~~~
Avamander
This sentence seems especially peculiar when you take into account that the
word "redis" means "radish" in Estonian.

~~~
plumeria
Funny that Redis has en edit distance of 2 with certain word... and also
rhymes with it.

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alfalfasprout
One of the neat things of instances w/ this scale of memory is that we can
once again start avoiding the perils of distributed computation. Because you
have immense data locality, a lot of computations can be parallelized much
more efficiently if they involve large sequences of trivially parallelizable
tasks that are short-lived.

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manigandham
Is SAP HANA any good?

I don't have any experience with it but it's the one single example that's
always used in every vendor post about high-memory machines.

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jcwayne
Interesting that you can't simply spin one up on your own; you have to contact
AWS to get the process started. Maybe it's simply because of the amount of
money you're committing to spend, but I find the possibility that they're now
offering an instance type that requires them to physically provision it for
you intriguing.

~~~
jedberg
If you're at the level of spend where paying almost a million dollars for an
instance, contacting them isn't too hard. You usually have the email address
and phone number of a bunch of people who can get it done in a minute or two.
And they don't usually provision it -- they just flip a bit to allow you to
use the API to provision it yourself.

I think they want the phone call in case you want 10 of them.

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kuwze
I wish “your data fits in memory”[0] was still up.

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9581862](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9581862)

~~~
mmt
The source is still up at
[https://github.com/lukegb/yourdatafitsinram](https://github.com/lukegb/yourdatafitsinram)

Sadly, it just used 6TB as a fixed cutoff, so keeping it up-to-date would be a
manual task.

Today, only a few years later, that number is 24TB. (Even more sadly, that's
for the _last_ generation of Intel CPU, whereas the current 8S generation tops
out at 12TB and isn't even scheduled to have models that would get to 24TB
until next year).

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israrkhan
I would like to see if you can build such a monster yourself, and how much
would it cost? Did Amazon designed their own motherboards or used some off the
shelf boards?

~~~
Rychard
The processors they're using appear to be well in excess of $10,000 each. To
get 224 _physical_ cores, you'd need to run them in a 8-CPU configuration, so
you've got ~$100,000 invested just in the processors alone.

Memory is absurdly expensive right now, and I'd be shocked if 12TB of it cost
any less than another $100,000.

You have to sign a multi-year reservation, and with a cost of $267,512.88 per
year (as calculated from another comment in the thread), I assume their profit
margins for the first year are nearly non-existent. However, over the course
of the remaining two years of your reservation, they're making a great deal of
money on each reservation.

So yea, I imagine someone could build something like this, but such an
individual would need to have very deep pockets.

~~~
slededit
12TB is only about $7000 in chips. I buy them for my own products. There’s a
lot of ancillary things you need but raw dimms aren’t anywhere near that
experience.

~~~
maximilianburke
The 128GB DIMMs are nearly $3000 each
([https://memory.net/product/m386aak40b40-cwd-
samsung-1x-128gb...](https://memory.net/product/m386aak40b40-cwd-
samsung-1x-128gb-ddr4-2666-lrdimm-pc4-21300v-l-octa-rank-x4-module/)) and you
need 96 of them.

Where can you get 12tb for $7000?

~~~
slededit
You'll pay more for the highest density chips, but there are back-planes that
support more of the lower density parts. I buy the raw chips in reels not
DIMMs. The $7k was based on my costs.

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joaomacp
I think in this case we should praise Amazon: this should really help for
certain use cases (running Minecraft at a decent frame-rate comes to mind).

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throwaway5250
640GB ought to be enough for anybody.

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swingline-747
_Retail_ price of the server components (no racks, PDUs, busbars, fibre drop,
network switch, KVM, circuit-breaker, rack&stack, rack anti-tip bracing,
artistic cabling, tech support):

CPU 8176M: $11,805.00 USD x 8 = $94,440.00

RAM 64GB: $866.23 x 192 = $166,316.16

Chassis + 2x 10 GbE NICs + SSD boot device: ~$8000

Total: ~$269k USD

AWS price: $803k

Under 150% gross profit margin (without electricity, fibre or real-state) over
3 years. I'd say the closer figure is ~ $300-400k per box for single company-
scale servers, leading to a closer-to-net profit Amazon profit of around 100%

Although, it's possible to keep a server beyond its lifecycle and run it into
the ground once it's already paid-for, as opposed to getting nothing at the
end of the Amazon lease.

There's trade-offs for both cases; some people would rather pay more to not
have to deal with quotes, vendors or shipping issues.

~~~
mmt
> (no racks, PDUs, busbars, fibre drop, network switch, KVM, circuit-breaker,
> rack&stack, rack anti-tip bracing, artistic cabling, tech support)

Anyone paying more than a negligible amount (per server) for any of these is
needlessly over-paying. For a server this expensive, it had better be way
below 1%. (Tech support is arguable, but it costs a pretty penny from AWS,
too).

> RAM 64GB: $866.23 x 192 = $166,316.16

These CPUs can't support 192 DIMMs, only 96, so they're limited to the much
more expensive 128GB modules. That means you're looking at closer to $250k for
the RAM alone.

~~~
swingline-747
Read the spec sheet...

6 channels per socket (2 controllers with 3 lanes each), 8 sockets, and 64 GB
_LR_ DIMMs.

128 DIMMs are $2-3k a pop.

192 sockets, 8 way, up to 24TB of ram w 128GB or 12TB with 64GB sticks:

[https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/7U/7088/SYS-7088B...](https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/7U/7088/SYS-7088B-TR4FT.cfm)

If someone wants to throw more money on RAM to be slightly faster, that's a
solution design-decision; it's doubtful Amazon would do that. If they are,
great.

~~~
mmt
>
> [https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/7U/7088/SYS-7088B](https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/7U/7088/SYS-7088B)

That's previous generation:

>Intel® Xeon® processor E7-8800 v4/v3 family

The articles states:

> All three sizes are powered by the latest generation Intel® Xeon® Platinum
> 8176M (Skylake) processors

You mention the 8176Ms in your original comment, too. The current SuperMicro
product that supports those is
[https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/7U/7089/SYS-7089P...](https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/7U/7089/SYS-7089P-TR4T.cfm)
and that only has 96 DIMM slots.

> Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, 8S-3 UPI up to 10.4GT/s

> 96x 288-pin DDR4 DIMM slots

> Supports up to 12TB DDR4 ECC 3DS LRDIMM in 96 DIMM slots

I think you'll find that this is due to the limitations of the CPU itself:

> Max Memory Size (dependent on memory type) 1.5 TB

according to [https://ark.intel.com/products/120505/Intel-Xeon-
Platinum-81...](https://ark.intel.com/products/120505/Intel-Xeon-
Platinum-8176M-Processor-38_5M-Cache-2_10-GHz)

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eip
This is bad for $MU.

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Bishonen88
but will it run GTA5?

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quickthrower2
It could run GTA5 inside JS inside an Electron app :-)

~~~
Rychard
The jury is still out regarding its ability to run Slack.

