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Comment by Xcelerate | Hacker News Reader

This is great! Just out of curiosity, how does the $0.70 / hour rate compare to the per-hour electricity cost of running a K80 (at full load)?

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https://images.nvidia.com/content/pdf/kepler/Tesla-K80-Board...

"The board is designed for a maximum input power consumption of 300 W"

So one hour at home:

Power used: 300 Wh

Price: $0.20/kWh

Total cost: $0.06/hour

Google cost: $0.70

You could say it's 10X more expensive, but you need to include all additional costs, power is just a fraction of it. The GPU itself is $5k, which over - let's say - 3 years would cost $5/day, or $0.20/hour, and if you're using it a third of the time, just that amounts to $0.60/hour. Add everything else (you might use less than 1/3 of the time) and it would be far more expensive than using it in the cloud. As it is expected to be.

Unless you are using Geforces, which are much cheaper than 5k$ and have near performance (single-precision).

A major use for GPU in the cloud is not being limited to the 8-12GB(ish) limits of enthusiast cards. There's similar processing performance, and the ability to store all you need in memory is a much closer reality to why these cards go for $5k

I'm not sure most gtx users doing hpc can be called "enthusiasts". After all, most research is done in these devices, and most models should therefore fit memory requirements (unless you're doing some hardcore - or lazy engineered research model) . Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK the tesla cards are designed to fit regulated markets and are not mass produced like the geforces, therefore the elevated prices.

The only problem is GeForce 1080s (for example) burn out much quicker under heavy load. They're not designed to sit inside an enterprise chassis

Do you mean that they fail? I have built a mining setup with multiple gpus in the past and haven't lost a card. I am 100% sure that Google is smarter than me at such setups.

Also interested in seeing what sort of failure rates you've had with GPUs. Our's have worked fine - but n=4.

I'm confused, the google cost is $0.70/minute not $0.70/hour correct? Aka it is $42.00/hour?

No. It's charged at a rate of $.70/hour per die, but usage is billed per minute. For example, if you use a K80 for 24 minutes (i.e., 40% of an hour) you pay $.7 * .4 = $0.28 total.

Keep in mind that they're tricking you. Yes, the entire card is $5k, but they're selling access per GPU. This card has two processors on it, so they're actually selling access to half that card.

But on the other hand, everyone assumed that because that's how MS and Amazon do it...

I think that's why they chose the K80 as well. By today's standards it's an extremely old card (2 generations behind), but it's the last professional series card to feature two processors on it. It's easier for them to sell, I guess.

Actually, it's more that it's the best Kepler class part. Maxwell, unfortunately, doesn't have full-speed double precision, locking out an entire (important) segment of the market. As I said in another thread, we'll have P100s and so on as soon as we can.

Fair enough, but Maxwell makes up for the lack of DP with other features that other customers appreciate more. Pascal will solve all those issues, but the P100 unfortunately will probably be extremely expensive to use because of the cost of the card.

M60 was the last to feature 2 GPUs. See this convenient reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Tesla#Specifications_an...

But the double precision perf of M60 is very low and less than the K80 due to limitations of the Maxwell microarchitecture. So we could say K80 is the last decent dual-GPU Nvidia card...

Ah, sorry, I forgot about that one. The Tesla Maxwells came much, much later after the Geforce cards, so it wasn't very long until Pascal was released. To meet all the needs of the customer, Maxwell was likely not a good choice, but the single precision was much better than Kepler.

It's not $0.7/min, it's $0.7/hour.

Typo; thanks.

K80 maximum input power is 300W. The average price people in the U.S. pay for electricity is about 12 cents per kilowatt-hour.

So, around 4 cents an hour?

Plus you need to cool that 300W in a datacenter, which costs a few cents I am sure.

Google is renewable at this point I believe.

Which doesn't even remotely mean their energy is free (though they don't pay as much as you do at home per unit, because they specifically build datacenters where they can get power cheaper, because it's a huge cost at datacenter scale)

I didn't say it was even remotely free, but it's at a scale compared to consumers that it's pretty damn close. 70 cents a minute is A LOT to pay to run these GPU's on Google's end. Which is the point of this discussion.

On the market, renewable energy costs more than non-renewable, simply because there is a higher demand for renewable, and non-renewable has no benefit for consumers.

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