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Graphics Cloud Google The Almighty Buck

Google Cloud Platform Cuts the Price of GPUs By Up To 36 Percent (techcrunch.com) 28

In a blog post, Google's Product Manager, Chris Kleban, announced that the company is cutting the price of using Nvidia's Tesla GPUs through its Compute Engine by up to 36 percent. The older K80 GPUs will now cost $0.45 per hour while the more powerful P100 machines will cost $1.46 per minute (all with per-second billing). TechCrunch reports: The company is also dropping the prices for preemptible local SSDs by almost 40 percent. "Preemptible local SSDs" refers to local SSDs attached to Google's preemptible VMs. You can't attach GPUs to preemptible instances, though, so this is a nice little bonus announcement -- but it isn't going to directly benefit GPU users. As for the new GPU pricing, it's clear that Google is aiming this feature at developers who want to run their own machine learning workloads on its cloud, though there also are a number of other applications -- including physical simulations and molecular modeling -- that greatly benefit from the hundreds of cores that are now available on these GPUs. The P100, which is officially still in beta on the Google Cloud Platform, features 3594 cores, for example. Developers can attach up to four P100 and eight K80 dies to each instance. Like regular VMs, GPU users will also receive sustained-use discounts, though most users probably don't keep their GPUs running for a full month.
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Google Cloud Platform Cuts the Price of GPUs By Up To 36 Percent

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  • by invictusvoyd ( 3546069 ) on Tuesday November 21, 2017 @05:05AM (#55593573)
    Would it be profitable?
    • by Anonymous Coward

      NO, not even close. GPU mining on bitcoin hasn't been profitable for years.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 21, 2017 @05:28AM (#55593603)

    How long will it take before someone thinks "hey, you know what would be great? If you could own a VM. Like a cloud computer, but for you, personally. A personal computer, so to speak."

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 21, 2017 @05:39AM (#55593627)

    Boss: Could you edit this a bit so it doesn't look like a direct copypaste?
    Editor: Sure thing, I'll change "hours" to "minutes" on this bit.

  • by wjcofkc ( 964165 ) on Tuesday November 21, 2017 @05:52AM (#55593657)
    There was such thing as a K80, but nostalgia ensues none-the-less. I'm going to have to dig up some old hardware install OS\2 Warp now, all for the joy of setting jumpers.
  • My Voodoo2 card outperforms all of those options, plus I can play Quake on 800x600 with ultra high settings on it.
  • by dave562 ( 969951 ) on Tuesday November 21, 2017 @07:07AM (#55593781) Journal

    Like regular VMs, GPU users will also receive sustained-use discounts, though most users probably don't keep their GPUs running for a full month.

    Challenge accepted!

    Hold my beer...

  • Is cloud pricing complex because it has to be -- so many options and permutations of configuration that it addresses a market need for flexibility?

    Or is it done because of economic viability? In other words, if there was just some standard monthly rate for a VM regardless of utilization the price would end up being so high that it would be non-competitive? I accept that even in this situation there would be some variability -- maybe CPU count, memory quantity, disk consumption, but more or less flat rate

    • In my experience, Google makes the pricing more opaque than it needs to. I have experience of a couple of other providers, who charge for the resource you've been allocated, regardless of how you use it (we just use VMs, no fancy-schmancy stuff). They may have some sort of fair-use clauses that mean they'll throttle your VM if you burn too much CPU for too long - I'm not sure. Google charge for idle, and then for how much you use it, and then give you a committed use discount. It's really hard to know anyth

  • I think I wet my pants!
  • How about a bounds check on some of these articles?

    $1.46 per minute is $767,000 per year.

    That rate makes no sense, no matter what the mark-up is to be in the cloud. Does no one read these before they go live?

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