Next-Generation GPU-Powered EC2 Instances (G3)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-next-generation-gpu-powered-ec2-instances-g3/

by janober • 9 years ago

88 69 9 years ago

aws.amazon.com

mankoxyz• 9 years ago

Is it profitable to use these for mining cryptocurrency?

BillinghamJ• 9 years ago

toredash• 9 years ago

Of course not. Then everyone would use it for that purpose alone.

BenoitP• 9 years ago

Nope. I have made profitability assessments on several different cloud GPU solutions having different hardware.

As a general rule, for every 100 USD you'd only mine about ~50 USD's worth of crypto-currencies.

Which is not surprising since on these products you get a fancy motherboard + high-end Intel CPUs + boatloads of RAM.

These are of little to no use when mining, and account for about half of the cost of this hardware. Also, the local cost of electricity is not the lowest price in the world (China having one of the lowest)

While the price of hardware is fixed, crypto-currencies possess a difficulty adjustment mechanism. This makes the whole system have an upper bound on mining profitability, and this bound converges on the profitability of the best-yield-hardware's. Which would be something to the tune of this [1]. Note that while having 6 GPUs, this system has 8 GB of RAM and an Intel Celeron.

[1] https://blockoperations.com/6-gpu-mining-rig-amd-rx580-intel...

----

EDIT: We're talking about IO-bandwidth-bound crypto-currencies here, like all the ones based on EThash[2][3], Ethereum being one of them. Bitcoin's upper bound on profitability is set by the best ASICs for SHA256 processing.

[2] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Ethash

[3] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Ethash-Design-Rational...

Jdam2• 9 years ago

You probably didn't evaluate Spot prices. I wrote a tool once to evaluate current AWS spot prices against the Ethereum price and sometimes it was a low as losing 2 cents per hour and G2 instance.

Gouido2• 9 years ago

I have some free AWS credits and would like to use them to mine some cryptocurrencies. Anyone here able to help me out as I'm quite a noob in this field..? I thought if I can launch loads of instances at the same time to mine the same currency, I would burn all my credits in no time but have higher rewards, or am I wrong?

Love to hear your thoughts on this!

dkersten4• 9 years ago

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.

baq• 9 years ago

gaming GPU prices and availability would like to talk with you. where i live, 1070 price has gone up 50% in 6 months - if you manage to get one. it's crazy and was attributed to ethereum/zcash mining.

arithma• 9 years ago

This does not apply to Equihash (ZCash) or DaggerHashimoto. NiceHash consistently mines those on my 2 rigs (3x 1070 GTX rigs.)

jnwatson• 9 years ago

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

kayoone• 9 years ago

well in 2011 i was using a Desktop PC + 3 GPUs to mine bitcoins which was barely profitable at a Bitcoin price of around $20 USD. Would i have kept them though and not sold at that price.... FML

Gouido2• 9 years ago

I could reward if someone can help me out burning my AWS credits to mine lots of cryptocurrencies! ;)

Dolores12• 9 years ago

It's not profitable to mine using your own money. But i am pretty sure those instances will be abused by carders. Like you invest 100$ in carded money and get 50$ back in cryptocurrency.

phreeza• 9 years ago

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

piqufoh• 9 years ago

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.

amq• 9 years ago

up to 18 H.264 1080p30 streams

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

Scaevolus• 9 years ago

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

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...

SoapSeller• 9 years ago

NVENC[0] has some comparessions with x264.

In our use case(sports broadcasting, 720p) we found that in reasonable bitrate(>1Mb) NVIDIA HQ quality was virtually the same to x264 faster. (in newer versions of nvenc, they got amazingly better in the last couple of years) When the bandwidth drop you start to see x246 advantage.

[0] https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-video-codec-sdk

girvo2• 9 years ago

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

layoric• 9 years ago

They definately do, only the p2.xlarge though I think.

nl• 9 years ago

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.

alexcnwy• 9 years ago

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

girvo2• 9 years ago

The projects I'm working on unfortunately do; less legislation directly though and more extremely exacting regulators.

More selfishly, I game using parsec.tv and would love a new rig, and it's pretty latency sensitive! :)

lars3• 9 years ago

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.

moonbug225• 9 years ago

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

_zl9i• 9 years ago

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

dmichulke• 9 years ago

His point is:

They didn't say newest generation, only next and next may in this case refer to

- "next after kepler" (parent's assumptions) or

- "next after current" (other commenters' assumption)

boulos5• 9 years ago

I was also surprised (and sent it around to our team internally last night). We're skipping Maxwell entirely as you can see from my previous comment threads.

For display it's still a fine part. The P100 is also a beast, so its overkill for most people just doing Remote Desktop. So perhaps the M60 (like with Azure) fills this market segment for them, and they don't mind the hardware diversity.

[Edit: Too sleepy. A post down below reminds us that these are G-series and G is for Graphics. So yeah, I assume they just didn't want to wait for enough P4 parts in volume or will quickly make another such announcement about the Pascals].

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

dman2• 9 years ago

There was an announcement last year that AMD FirePro™ S9300 x2 were coming to Google cloud. Any reason why those have not hit general release yet? I have some OpenCL workloads that I could put to good use on those.

matthewmacleod• 9 years ago

I think "generation" here is referring to EC2 generations and not GPU generations – AWS tends to use that term to refer to new instance types being released.

((Next Generation) (GPU EC2 Instances)) rather than ((Next Generation GPU) (EC2 Instances)) :)

DannyBee• 9 years ago

"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. "

It's one thing if one of them is like that, but if all of them are like that, maybe it's not because of the cloud providers?

lars3• 9 years ago

Oh, there are smaller vendors renting out Pascal architecture GPUs. Yet Amazon and Azure are stuck at prev-gen (M60), while Google is all the way back at prev-prev-gen (K80).

make32• 9 years ago

Or GTX 1080 ti. Aren't the Tesla class like the P100 mostly super overpriced for deep learning because their only main advantage is Double (64 bit) float support, and no one really needs that? Plus half float (16 bit) support, which is not super widely used (but certainly more than double). Something like 95%+ of Deep Learning must be done with single floats (32 bits) right now afaik, making this a fairly dubious expense

dave_sullivan2• 9 years ago

Aren't the Tesla class like the P100 mostly super overpriced for deep learning

Yes. Nvidia has real competition from AMD in consumer graphics but no competition in enterprise. Their consumer cards are sold at a competitive price while their enterprise cards are marked way up.

If cloud providers were really smart, they'd release cheaper/just-as-fast instances with consumer cards, but Nvidia probably doesn't want to do that deal; they'd prefer to push teslas as the standard for GPGPU, even if they have to mark them down for cloud providers.

floatboth• 9 years ago

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

moonbug225• 9 years ago

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

marklit• 9 years ago

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

moonbug225• 9 years ago

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.

swiley• 9 years ago

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.

_neil• 9 years ago

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/

bryanlarsen• 9 years ago

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

sp332• 9 years ago

moonbug225• 9 years ago

So?

shaklee32• 9 years ago

You can't give fractional GPU instances with this card. The K80 had two logically separate chips that were separately-addressable over PCIe. This allowed them to send two different PCIe devices to different VMs. The M60 doesn't have this. The V100 is supposed to allow time slicing to do this kind of thing, but that's not out, nor do we know how well it'll work.

horusthecat• 9 years ago

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.

dkobran• 9 years ago

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

Next-Generation GPU-Powered EC2 Instances (G3)

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