Compute Engine machine types with up to 96 vCPUs and 624GB of memory

Re:Compute Engine machine types with up to 96 vCPUs and 624G... by mattparlane on Friday October 06, 2017 @08:17AM (#15416176)

Can you really spin one of these up on demand? That obviously means that they have machines of that size (or greater) sitting idle, waiting for someone to use them. That's mind-boggling.

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Re:Compute Engine machine types with up to 96 vCPUs and 624G... by dx034 on Friday October 06, 2017 @08:20AM (#15416195)

They can still divide them up for the smaller sizes preemptible and destroy those once they get a request in. That way utilisation should be quite good. Yield probably not as high (since hardware costs will be higher than for multiple small machines) but the yield of renting out the highest variant sometimes will be worth it.

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Re:Compute Engine machine types with up to 96 vCPUs and 624G... by kevin42 on Friday October 06, 2017 @10:47AM (#15417162)

Yes, I configured a 64 cpu machine in a matter of minutes, ran a test on it for 24 hours, then shut it down and deleted the instance. Total cost was around $200.

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Re:Compute Engine machine types with up to 96 vCPUs and 624G... by tgtweak on Friday October 06, 2017 @11:11AM (#15417372)

*vCPU.

But yes, they probably strive to keep below 10% vacancy on all hardware.

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Re:Compute Engine machine types with up to 96 vCPUs and 624G... by misframer on Friday October 06, 2017 @08:29AM (#15416251)

GCP has live migration. Maybe they make space if it doesn't exist.

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Re:Compute Engine machine types with up to 96 vCPUs and 624G... by tgtweak on Friday October 06, 2017 @11:12AM (#15417391)

Hard to make hardware appear out of nowhere.

They only use live migration to do host maintenance iirc.

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Re:Compute Engine machine types with up to 96 vCPUs and 624G... by milesward on Friday October 06, 2017 @11:33AM (#15417573)

There are lots of reasons to shift stuff around, and there’s lots of hardware :) -googler

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Re:Compute Engine machine types with up to 96 vCPUs and 624G... by ericfrederich on Friday October 06, 2017 @09:06AM (#15416458)

Idle, or running their own internal computations, or running lower preemptiable stuff.

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Re:Compute Engine machine types with up to 96 vCPUs and 624G... by jsolson on Friday October 06, 2017 @10:45AM (#15417150)

Preemptible VMs exist in part to avoid leaving capacity sitting idle.

We hate idle resources. :)

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