Computer buying help thread for October

[AJLynn]

They don't say what software runs on it. It seems a tad doubtful that it's for Ry's target market. (Or for us even - unless Amazon is actually going to have farm machines set up with render software installed.) Anyway, as I keep saying, find some GPU rendering software you'd actually want to use, and then get excited about GPU hardware. And don't make me use any more italics.

[Devin Johnston]

Jeff posted an article on the Amazon cloud so I went to the site and it's apparent that they didn't set it up for rendering. Even at $2-$3 a day if you use it 8-9 hours a day you'd be looking at $6000 a year. The question is can you get local GPU processing that's going to work well for that price and how much of a lag is associated with cloud computing?

[revuprender]

Ratnakar,

 

I am also confused as to why you think Amazon announcing GPUs now available for use on their EC2 service makes me unaware of the complexity of GPU computing? For the last two days I have spent time in discussions with the Amazon EC2 folks and they are very helpful and accommodating and in fact RevUp Render's GPU based product will now be "Powered by Amazon AWS."

 

Jeff Mottle asked me what I knew about this new offering last night and I am the one who told him that there are automatically 8 GPUs available by default that anyone can go and spin up Amazon AMIs of. You can easily fill out form if you have a good use case reason to request more than 8 GPUs, but honestly 8 Telsa 2050 "Fermi" GPUs is a lot of power for rendering.

 

I knew that Amazon was going to be putting GPUs into their public cloud but I just did not know it would be so soon. It is a great thing that they have done this as it will now make GPU supercomputing available to anyone who wants to use it on the fly without spending much at all.

[Devin Johnston]

Ry what software will this new Amazon service be compatible with, I didn't see any information on their site about rendering software.

[AJLynn]

Nice. So you're going to be able to get GPU time as needed without all that upfront capital investment? (And presumably there's going to be quite enough for your needs?) Good deal.

[revuprender]

Amazon has set this up for anyone to be able to use it. What more do you want them to do? They have built millions and millions of dollars worth of equipment and have a system that allows anyone to access it for only $2.10/hour as little or as much as they want. I do not see how they could possibly make it any more affordable without giving it away for free.

 

Right now you can go and fire up computer clusters with GPU's and then load any software to run on top of it, you can run any kind of parallels GPU compute software. Here are the specs here: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/hpc-applications/

 

The HPC instances are totally different then the regular instances on EC2. Traditional HPC supercomputing must have two things: 1.) high end GPU, RAM, and possible GPUs now and 2. Fast Ethernet connections for clustering. As you can see both of these are there.

 

This announcement is a huge step forward in supercomputing for the masses and I can state that it will not be long until GPU rendering software is made available with custom AMI instances that can be used by anyone.

[revuprender]

check out this press release here: http://pressroom.nvidia.com/easyir/customrel.do?easyirid=A0D622CE9F579F09&version=live&releasejsp=release_157&prid=686140

 

It clearly states that RealityServer is available, however I have dug deeper and while there are what they call mental cloud AMIs on EC2 and they have been on there for a long time from what I was told...There currently is no AMIs available for RealityServer that can use the GPU clusters. This is an issue that Amazon has to work out since they have not set up there Dev Pay system to work with HPC yet. Once they do this then developers will be able to load their software on for use and get paid a small hourly fee for its use. This is wonderful because then no one has to go out and deal with buying something like RealityServer because it is expensive.

 

In fact I spoke with some of the managers in charge of all of EC2 and they want to setup a much more extensive system then just their current dev pay system they have setup for non HPC. They want to make it more flexible for developers and end-users.

 

However we will be using EC2 and their GPUs for our exhibit booth demos at Autodesk University to run our RevUp RealityServer software for rendering with Revit. The way we are able to do this is by loading RealityServer ourselves with a private license for it and thus creating our own custom AMI.

 

Yes exactly Andrew, it is a breath of fresh air versus all the other GPU offerings. Even though other companies have GPUs available on the cloud, no one else is set up such a nice system like Amazon. Talking to the Amazon folks is nice because they clearly state that they do not think like a regular hosting company. There main goal is just to be able to enable as many people as possible to use the servers they have setup and to make it as affordable as possible.

[AJLynn]

Looks like a good setup. Also looks like you'd need some amount of expertise to use it, unless you had, say, some service that would provide a plugin that takes care of the interface for you Aside from that I can see how this could be useful to a mid size firm or savvy freelancer who happens to want a bunch of GPU power - not having to make the major equipment purchase can be a very good thing, even if it costs more in the long run, and sometimes you can even write render farm expenses into the contract.