UK BOINC Team Forum

AI proto-boffins can now rent up to 16 GPUs, the largest amount on any single virtual machine currently available, via Google Cloud.

"We are excited to announce the general availability of A2 VMs based on the NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPUs in Compute Engine," the company said.

Devs can use the A2 VMs in various configurations, and scale across 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 GPUs.

With 16 GPUs, the cluster has an interconnect speed of 9.6TB/s using Nvidia's NVlink, and up to 3TB of local SSD memory. Having more GPUs on a single machine will benefit those training particularly large AI models.

These instances are available to customers in the us-central1, asia-southeast1, and europe-west4 zones at the moment, and cost from $0.87 per hour per GPU on Google Cloud's preemptible service, depending on local demand.

#1 machines for hire
Post by davidBAM » Fri Dec 25, 2020 11:52 pm

I am happy to announce that we have made a formal offer to purchase the bookshop premises below the flat after the bookshop moves to new premises in 4 or 5 weeks. This gives me more space to get more machines and particularly more GPU. Even if the purchase doesn't go ahead, I'll use my garage instead

By putting my time and resources into hardware provision, I am hoping to expand the 'rental' side so that any team member can use the hardware to chase personal and TSBT team goals. I am looking to get a bit more professional about this so a big 'Thank You' to the guinea-pigs who have rented thus far. You can see from this thread https://tsbt.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=25169 that different folks have different reasons for liking rentals - I've listed some below ...

In the New Year, rentals will be for ...
electricity at cost to friendly teams. Unused capacity may be offered elsewhere at higher prices. Electricity may well be more expensive in Scotland than where you live BUT you only pay it once i.e. no need to run AC to cool the place back down. Most of Scotland's electricity comes from renewable sources - wind, hydro-electric and even tidal
whole machines ... I will put an individual meter on each machine offered to measure the electricity used when fully deployed on Collatz + ODLK1 (both nice short WU). If you don't keep it fully deployed, that is your problem
current electricity price for me is £0.16262 /KwH + 5% tax
machines will aim to have minimum 1Gb RAM per thread so enough to run pretty much any reasonable project combination i.e. don't run Amicable 2-up or all threads on WCG Africa Rainfall
most machines will tend to be GPU-oriented, i.e. lower thread counts so that the GPU is mainly what you are hiring
most will have single GPU as the management of multiple GPU on some projects is a whole lot harder e.g. srbase
Linux machines will have multi-instance, including some instances with 64 GPU hack. All instances capable of bunkering 4000 WU each
Longer deals, 3 months or more, will get a dedicated krunchie instance to view and control machines. I can also manage them on your behalf if you prefer
minimum periods / costs apply
Reasons to rent
want to contribute more to the team but lack room to get more hardware
spousal pressure
live in hotter climate for running GPU
meet personal targets quickly
don't boinc at all but just want to do my bit

Almost finished upgrading gtx1660ti to rtx2080ti so LOTS of gpu power available now. PM me if you'd like specifics

chriscambridge wrote: ↑Tue Mar 23, 2021 6:19 pmI would be interested in renting some David_BAM GPUs to run on GPUGrid, but the forum is locked for me. Perhaps you could provide David with a login and ask him to come to the forum?

UBT - Timbo wrote: ↑Mon Mar 22, 2021 10:48 pm you get 100% control