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A comment on Why Fugaku, Japan's fastest supercomputer, went virtual on AWS. Parent comment

Re:Why Fugaku, Japan's fastest supercomputer, went virtual o... by littlestymaar on Thursday April 18, 2024 @02:45PM (#40079407)
There's also the third way, of going for intermediate-size cloud providers, you get the lack of Capex and actual hardware to deal with without the AWS premium. I don't understand why so many people act as if the only alternative was AWS or self-hosted.
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Re:Why Fugaku, Japan's fastest supercomputer, went virtual o... by moralestapia on Thursday April 18, 2024 @04:36PM (#40080459)
Never tried to suggest that, but tbh, the value added services on both AWS and GCP are hard to emulate, and they "just work" already.

Sure, I could spend a few weeks (months?) compiling and trying some random GNU-certified "alternatives" for Cloud Services but ... just nah ...

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Re:Why Fugaku, Japan's fastest supercomputer, went virtual o... by fock on Thursday April 18, 2024 @05:38PM (#40080999)
The main value is that you can pay money to have decent network and storage with the hyperscalers. Which none of the intermediate-size cloud services offer to my knowledge?

> I could spend a few weeks (months?) compiling

why would you compile infra-stuff?! Usually this is nicely packaged...

> random GNU-certified "alternatives" for Cloud Services but

For application software you have to take care of this also with the cloud or are you just using the one precompiled environment they offer? Which cloud services do you need anyway - in our area (MatSci), things are very, very POSIX-centered and that is simple to set up.

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Re:Why Fugaku, Japan's fastest supercomputer, went virtual o... by moralestapia on Thursday April 18, 2024 @06:04PM (#40081249)
>Usually this is nicely packaged...

That has almost never been my experience with "alternatives" but if you can provide a few links I would like to learn about them.

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Re:Why Fugaku, Japan's fastest supercomputer, went virtual o... by fock on Friday April 19, 2024 @06:35AM (#40085111)
well, I don't know what you use? however

- ZFS is in Ubuntu now, you can host a nice NFS-server easily. MiniIO is a single Go binary, databases are packaged too.

- Slurm is packaged too! I have to admit this gets hairy if you want to have something like https://github.com/NVIDIA/pyxis but still this is far from arcane "alternative" software but the standard. If you buy Nvidia, it comes with your DGX-server just like its rented out by Amazon...

the main remaining pain point I would see is actually netbooting/autoprovisioning the machines (at least this was annoying with us).

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Re:Why Fugaku, Japan's fastest supercomputer, went virtual o... by littlestymaar on Thursday April 18, 2024 @06:36PM (#40081473)
What kind of “services” do they provide that provide value in the kind of HPC setting you were talking about?

> trying some random GNU-certified "alternatives" for Cloud Services but ... just nah ...

A significant fraction, if not the majority, of those services are in fact hosted versions of open-source projets[1] so there's no need to be snobbish.

[1]: and that's why things like Teraform and Redis are going source-available in recent days, to fight against cloud vendors parasitic behavior

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Re:Why Fugaku, Japan's fastest supercomputer, went virtual o... by Symbiote on Friday April 19, 2024 @02:56AM (#40084080)
It sounds like you're spending 7 figures of your research money without having done the most basic investigation of alternatives.

I spend low 6 figures of research money on hardware + staff each year, and this avoids us spending 7 figures on cloud costs + staff.

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