Benchmarks In The Cloud. How to interpret?

Uttamattamakin · January 8, 2019

I am not sure where to put a question like this since it involves aspects of networking, hardware, software and programming. It involves a cloud service that it seems can't out perform a several generations old computer according to it's own bench marking commands. See below... a cloud based system made for scientific computing is outclassed by a 3rd generation core i7. (And my laptop with a 8th gen not shown but it did top this same benchmark.)

Question. What can explain this? Is it a matter of the fact this was ran via the internet? Are cloud servers like these just not going to devote extra resources to blow the doors off such a benchmark?

How can a data center be beaten by older systems?

Context

A well known program among scientist is Wolfram's Mathematica for years and years people would ~~pira..~~. buy legal licenses for it as students. Many universities will have a site wide license. It can be used to do all sorts of numerical and symbolic calculations. For example it can tap into Nvidia CUDA and /or into Open CL to GPU accelerate various task without needing to know how to write the code yourself. It can do your calculus homework and give you a symbolic answer. It is not as flexible as Matlab but much more user friendly. Last but not least access to it's cloud is free.

I have a copy of Mathematica locally but it would be nice to not have to push my own computer really hard for the computations I need. My little laptop winds up sounding like a jet taking off when I try to evaluate certain integrals.

Here is a link to the particular mathematica notebook, in the cloud, so you can try running this yourself and see if it makes a difference.

https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/0b709449-e2fe-40e5-a412-2ae2e3efd56d

Last question. Any way to enhance performance of such a cloud based service from my end?

Uttamattamakin · January 8, 2019

12 hours ago, James Evens said:

Judging by wolfram alpha and the speed of the some api calls it is slow and you can not do anything about there cloud.

Don't know if shadow also bans 24/7 scientific workloads but it could be a cheap option.

I don't think so. One does not get shadow banned for asking tech questions on a tech forum. They're sort of the whole point.

So much for the idea of a cloud replacing having a serious workstation (or even just a gaming PC with a good GPU).

For context this is what I get with my own computer a HP Specter 8th gen 4 core i7 1080 Egpu with CUDA drivers installed in Linux.