Ask HN: Any interest in cheap High Performance Computing?

1 pointsv-yanakiev1y ago1 comments

I noticed how cheap Hetzner's dedicated vCPUs were compared to big-name cloud providers. Comparing Hetzner vs GCP: the pricing for 16 vCPU, 64GB RAM - 96.49EUR / month vs 609.71USD / month.

https://www.hetzner.com/cloud#pricing

https://cloud.google.com/compute/vm-instance-pricing?hl=en

This made me think about running a cheap High Performance Computing service on Hetzner.

Would anyone be interested in such a service? It'd allow you to define (via a Dockerfile) a high performance computing environment, and start it / communicate with it / destroy it via a REST API. Each start would provision a new VM: it'd take 1 minute for the machine to start listening. This would keep costs extremely low.

1 comments

speleolinux1y ago

Hi, You prob need to do some investigation on what HPC users requirements are. For instance, genomics researchers need lots of cores and memory. For those users a 16 vCPU, 64GB RAM won't make the grade to be called HPC. They would need to have multiple vCPUs and use MPI to distribute their workload, and that adds complexity to their code. HPC nodes that I'm running in a cluster each have 64 cores and a minimum of 768 GB RAM each and some nodes have 1500 GB RAM. Even then some of the genomics jobs run for a few days to several hundred hours. The other problem is that users would probably not know how to write a docker file to create their custom compute environment. It would be a nice project though :-) Mike

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