Re:Next-Generation GPU-Powered EC2 Instances (G3)
by dman on Friday July 14, 2017 @12:30PM
(#14771077)
There was an announcement last year that AMD FirePro™ S9300 x2 were coming to Google cloud. Any reason why those have not hit general release yet? I have some OpenCL workloads that I could put to good use on those.
Re:Next-Generation GPU-Powered EC2 Instances (G3)
by boulos on Friday July 14, 2017 @12:43PM
(#14771176)
Still on it, and now coming really soon (hopefully). There were a lot of interesting challenges (power, software, datacenter process) along the way, since this is very new hardware to Google.
Out of curiosity, why OpenCL on AMD rather than OpenCL on say a K80 or AWS's M60s or upcoming P100s? (That is, are you blocked on having an AMD part, or do you have a great reason to prefer AMD for compute)
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and want to sell you GPUs!)
Re:Next-Generation GPU-Powered EC2 Instances (G3)
by dman on Friday July 14, 2017 @12:46PM
(#14771196)
Because the code is already validated / tuned and deployed on AMD parts. For a while NVidia dragged their feet on OpenCL so validating the app on their hardware was not possible.
Re:Next-Generation GPU-Powered EC2 Instances (G3)
by boulos on Friday July 14, 2017 @01:57PM
(#14771815)
Great feedback, thanks.
Re:Next-Generation GPU-Powered EC2 Instances (G3)
by agibsonccc on Friday July 14, 2017 @08:57PM
(#14774442)
FWIW, we haven't invested in opencl for anything due to the fragmentation. It's great to see google pushing an alternative.
Overall though, I would basically consider opencl "AMD's thing".
For display it's still a fine part. The P100 is also a beast, so its overkill for most people just doing Remote Desktop. So perhaps the M60 (like with Azure) fills this market segment for them, and they don't mind the hardware diversity.
[Edit: Too sleepy. A post down below reminds us that these are G-series and G is for Graphics. So yeah, I assume they just didn't want to wait for enough P4 parts in volume or will quickly make another such announcement about the Pascals].
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.