
New EC2 Instance Type - The Cluster GPU Instance - jeffbarr
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/11/new-ec2-instance-type-the-cluster-gpu-instance.html
======
mrb
Amazon is expanding their EC2 feature set so rapidly... The pace is mind
blowing to me. Last year, Randy Bias estimated EC2 was pulling $220M
revenue/yr:

[http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/amazons-
ec2-gen...](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/amazons-
ec2-generating-220m-annually)

And he estimated an overly conservative 10-20% annual growth. But given the
EC2 buzz this year, and personal anecdotes from my friends and colleagues
using it, my gut feeling tells me the 2010 revenues will have increased
50-100% over 2009 revenues.

Is EC2 profitable to Amazon? Likely _very_ profitable if you want my opinion.
It is well accepted in the industry that the dominant cost in large scale
datacenters is power and cooling --not hardware, not human resources-- and I
keep running numbers in my head and the hourly prices of all instance types
are well above power & cooling.

Just as an example, we know that this new GPU instance has two 95W Xeon X5570
and two 247W Tesla M2050; assuming (1) a max TDP of 50W for the motherboard
and rest of the server, (2) instances are run under full load 100% of the time
and always reach these max TDP numbers (unlikely, but follow me for the sake
of the argument), (3) Amazon uses servers with 80PLUS power supplies (80%
efficient or more), (4) a rather good datacenter with a PUE of 1.3 (power
usage effectiveness, which includes overhead from power distribution and
cooling; numbers in the range of 1.2-1.4 are often quoted by James Hamilton
from the AWS team: <http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/>), and (5) electricity
costs of $0.10/kWh (average in the US, but I know Amazon datacenters are in
locations with cheaper electricity), then the hourly power and cooling costs
would be:

    
    
      (95*2 + 50 + 247*2) / 0.8 * 1.3 / 1000 * 0.10 = $0.119/hr
    

Amazon charges 17x this amount for on-demand instances ($2.10/hr), and 6x this
amount for reserved instances ($0.74/hr).

Given these numbers, Amazon must recoup the initial deployment costs very,
very quickly... Which is why I also think EC2 must be very profitable.

~~~
ANH
It's even more impressive when you know Amazon started AWS to take advantage
of excess capacity they had during the off-season when they weren't dealing
with the crush of holiday orders.

~~~
nivertech
This is just urban myth, according to Werner Vogels.

~~~
ANH
Well, the Amazon Senior VP of International Retail said this was the case in
his talk for the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leadership series. So, seems
there's some dispute within the company. But I suppose I should take Werner's
word for it since he's the CTO.

~~~
randybias
It was premeditated and planned using all new capacity. I chatted with Chris
Pinkham, who architected and was VP of Engineering for EC2. I also verified
with Chris Brown, who was development lead for EC2 and Ben Black who was
leading networking.

------
AngryParsley
This is cool, but you know what would be even cooler? Instances with SSD
storage. It's so annoying to have database queries run an order of magnitude
faster on my MacBook Air than on a cloud server.

I don't know of any major provider that offers SSD instances. It really is an
untapped market.

~~~
StavrosK
I don't know if they use SSDs, but Linode's London servers are absolutely
_screaming_ fast.

Linode: Timing buffered disk reads: 230 MB in 3.01 seconds = 76.44 MB/sec

My local X-25M: Timing buffered disk reads: 246 MB in 3.02 seconds = 81.48
MB/sec

This would suggest they are using SSDs (or fast RAID? I'm not sure if this
benchmark is sequential access). I get comparable performance for the Georgia
data center, but it varies greatly there, so I'm not sure what's going on.

EDIT: Sorry, apparently I can't tell my sde from my sda. My _actual_ SSD
performance is:

Timing buffered disk reads: 564 MB in 3.01 seconds = 187.47 MB/sec

So yes, disregard everything above.

~~~
codedivine
76MB/s is quite common for regular hard drives. The great advantage of SSDs is
not necessarily sequential speed but rather random IO.

As for your X25-M, do you have TRIM enabled? Your read speeds are consistent
with a used-state SSD without TRIM.

~~~
StavrosK
I am using TRIM now (I assume), as I'm running the Ubuntu 10.10 kernel, which
supports it on ext4. Before this, I was running 10.04, which didn't support
trim. I'm not sure if I should clone the drive and reformat to get more speed,
and I'm also not sure if there are alignment issues (I followed Ted Ts'o's
advice on setting that up)...

~~~
codedivine
Sorry if you have already done all this, but do you know if you are using the
G1 or G2 X25-M? G1 doesn't have trim. G2 supports TRIM as long as you are not
using the old firmware. So might be worth checking your firmware etc.?

Btw here is hdparm reading for my Western Digital Caviar Black (regular hard
disk) just to give you an idea: 318 MB in 3.01 seconds = 105.56 MB/sec

~~~
StavrosK
I did upgrade my firmware a month ago, but I'm not sure which version I have,
I'll check. However, now that you mention it, I do remember the disk doing
200ish mb/sec, maybe this was a fluke. It's almost empty, I use 20 out of the
160 gb, so I don't think it's a matter of allocated space...

------
petercooper
It's not exactly an apples for apples comparison, but with your 8 instances
rocking 2 * 515Gflops of GPU each, you get just over 8Tflops. Looking back at
the TOP500 lists, this "peak" value would have got you into the top 15
supercomputers in 2003. (Looking back further, you'd be vying for a top 5 spot
in mid 2002..)

The more depressing observation is that 33.5ECUs are equivalent to 8 cores @
2.93GHz on Intel's recent architecture. This means your typical "small" EC2
instance with 1 ECU is on a par with ~700MHz of a single modern Intel core.
(Highly unscientific but an interesting ballpark.)

~~~
haribilalic
_This means your typical "small" EC2 instance with 1 ECU is on a par with
~700MHz of a single modern Intel core._

Amazon says that " _one EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) provides the equivalent CPU
capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor_ "[1].

[1] <http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/>

~~~
chesser
GP:

> > _The more depressing observation is that 33.5ECUs are equivalent to 8
> cores @ 2.93GHz_

You said:

> _I don't know where you got 700 MHz from, because by my math, it'd be
> equivalent to a 1.43 GHz Nehalem core (33.5 / 8_ * _2.93)_

Transposed.

>>> 8*2.93/33.5

0.69970149253731351

8 cores at 2.93 GHz is 23.44 GHz, which means one compute unit is 700 MHz.

A modern processor can do more per clock than an older processor. In addition,
it has a larger cache, faster cache, and a faster memory bus, although on the
flip side the memory bus is being shared between more CPUs.

------
matclayton
Looks like the Tidepowerd beta came out with perfect timing, must give this a
spin <http://www.tidepowerd.com/> compile .net code to gpu.

P.s. Disclaimer, they are friends of mine, the beta is pretty epic!

------
perssontm
Amazon are really pushing the boundaries in the vm area, and also making it
easily available and quite affordable as well.

It seems like they will never turn evil, but most big companies do, or perhaps
they are just hiding it very well. ;)

~~~
StavrosK
It's easier to keep honest when your business model is "provide great service
for a good price".

------
tomjen3
Man thats a beast of a machine - each of the CPUs have 8b of cache, not to
mention that you get a terra flop of double precision.

Now if only I had some use for this :( (inspiration welcome, I am writing
about GPU programming right now).

~~~
shogunmike
The sky is your limit for inspiration. Check out the applications section of
the Wikipedia GPGPU page: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPGPU#Applications>

------
bartman
These machines hold their promises, they are extremely fast, the networking
between the instances in fast, as is their connection to the outside world.
I'm eager to see what people do with these.

And the pricing... to quote from the other article[1] on the GPU instances
that's on the front page right now:

"An 8 TeraFLOPS HPC cluster of GPU-enabled nodes will now only cost you about
$17 per hour."

[1]
[http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/11/cluster_gpu_inst...](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2010/11/cluster_gpu_instances_amazon_ec2.html)

~~~
bigiain
"I'm eager to see what people do with these."

Is anybody else thinking "custom built rainbow tables for any algorithm you
like, delivered directly into your S3 bucket in under 1 hour for $25"?

(I wonder how much this means I should up the bcrypt workfactor to keep my
password hashes secure from typical website crackers?)

~~~
binomial
Well, rainbow tables are defeated with salt. I wouldn't worry about that if
you're salting. And you are salting, right?

------
ithkuil
does anybody know GPU instances can be of any aid for building full text
indices (inverted lists) or other non-floating point workfloads ? I was
skimming through the title of a recent paper presenting an sorting algorithm
exploiting GPUs, but still I'm in the mental model of treating GPU workloads
as having to do with floating point operations.

~~~
jra101
Modern GPUs do have a full set of integer instructions, they just don't run as
fast as floating point instructions.

Depending on how well a problem maps to the massively parallel architecture of
a GPU, this may not matter.

~~~
mrb
This is wrong. The rate of integer and logical instructions that can be run
per clock is equal to or higher than floating point instructions. For example,
AMD GPUs 5-way VLIW units can execute, per clock: 5 integer/logical op, or 5
single precision flop, or 1 double precision flop. Nvidia GT200 GPU streaming
processors can execute, per (shader) clock: 1 integer/logical op, or 1 single
precision flop, or 0.5 double precision flop.

------
timf
Check out the extensive benchmarks here:

[http://blog.cyclecomputing.com/2010/11/a-couple-more-
nails-i...](http://blog.cyclecomputing.com/2010/11/a-couple-more-nails-in-the-
coffin-of-the-private-compute-cluster-gpu-on-cloud.html)

(HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1906452> )

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athst
Wow! Amazon is absolutely killing it. I wonder if this will be the inflection
point when GPU computing really takes off.

------
tszming
Seems this is dedicated server technology, not virtualization, except we can
boot up the server using API?

