[unexaminedlife]

I'm holding out for a better price on GPU instances (for parallel processing).

My 'back of the napkin' calculations indicate it would take very little time for it to pay for itself by purchasing your own NVIDIA GPU(s) and running them from a colo.

Especially if your requirements are for the instance(s) to run 24x7.

[ramraj07]

Why would they ever be not the case ? If you ignore sysadmin costs AWS is always more expensive (even when reserved for three years) than any machine you maintain yourself

[unexaminedlife]

I do my own sysadmin work when needed, but I find plenty of places where I'm gladly willing to make the relatively small concession (pay the cloud markup). In the case of GPU instances I find they're not even trying to be competitive with market costs.

[mhh__]

Isn't the whole point of cloud that you don't own the machines? The calculus probably isn't as good when you factor in support, maintenance, and power costs right?

[unexaminedlife]

Power is accounted for in my calculations. Technically today's gpu compute does wonders for power consumption. And likely to only improve from here.

In the many years I've used cloud I've never requested support, so in my experience I don't need to calculate that in.

And even when you consider machine costs, as long as you can get at least 1 yr (not an unreasonable assumption) out of your equipment you're more than making up for what it would've cost in the cloud.

[chrisseaton]

Can you actually buy GPUs now? An advantage of Amazon in the past was that they were actually available there, where they weren’t available to buy in practice.

[reedwolf]

Not sure what you mean. You can buy GPUs anywhere.

You can even buy Tesla V100s that power AWS accelerated instances.

[chrisseaton]

> Not sure what you mean.

Over the last decade there was often a major problem in GPU supply. Huge users like Amazon were presumably buying in bulk direct from manufacturers as custom runs so weren’t trying to buy them on the open market like everyone else.

Even other clouds had major problems getting them at some points.

[johntash]

There were lots of GPUs being bought up for crypto mining reasons, but that doesn't seem like it has been as big of a deal in the consumer market recently (at least locally.)

If anything, it generated a lot of cheap secondhand cards for sale in some places.

[sudosysgen]

There was never a real issue getting 4 or 5 commodity-grade GPUs. At worst, you had to pay a 20-30% premium.

[MattGaiser]

The crypto scams seem to have died off, so there are probably plenty of used ones on the market.

The demand right now has also fallen dramatically even from regular customers.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/coronavirus-motherboard-gr...

[unexaminedlife]

oh, yeah. Thanks for reminding me. Disclaimer: My needs are not for crypto currency :)