LTT Folding Team's Emergency Response to Covid-19

[ShortRouter]

4 minutes ago, Macaw2000 said:

You're using bad data to draw a wrong conclusion. I'm willing to bet I'm one of the most efficient, measured by $ TCO, folder here and I'm entirely in the cloud. It's not as fun (no RGB) but your math won't hold up. There's a reason everything went to the cloud.

Not sure what you mean by "bad data". The Google Cloud solution has no chance vs. my own calculations of a DIY rig. I have no experience with AWS so i can't say anything about that. There are some hidden costs such as maintenance, hardware troubleshooting and low flexibility of the DIY solution. Also, I'm comparing for the specific use case of folding based on FAH Bench numbers. Not a totally fair comparison of a datacenter 24 GB VRAM monster with a highend consumer GPU. The P100 / V100 may shine in other use cases, but for folding the much cheaper RTX 2080 Ti wins.

[ObeliskAG]

2 minutes ago, Macaw2000 said:

You're using bad data to draw a wrong conclusion. I'm willing to bet I'm one of the most efficient, measured by $ TCO, folder here and I'm entirely in the cloud. It's not as fun (no RGB) but your math won't hold up. There's a reason everything went to the cloud.

While I would agree that there are TCO benefits for having servers in a data centre that can provide 2N+1 power and cooling, "Cloud" simply means "other peoples computers". What cloud provides business is convenience (because upgrading your NetApp has become an ongoing PITA), but make no mistake that this approach often costs more than doing things in-house. The trick with in-house, is maintaining the skills. Like most things in life, your specific needs will determine the best solution, and that does not always mean the cloud. Recently reviewed an analysis of in-house verses cloud backup. OMG - TCO for cloud was horrific!

[DonGuano]

Where do you get these WU certificates?

 

[Kilrah]

24 minutes ago, ShortRouter said:

Absolutely. Actually paying for that service is not worth it. I can build a custom watercooled folding / rendering rig with 4x RTX 2080 Ti on X99 platform (used), 64 GB RAM for under 10,000 € easily. Mid-tier Quadros are not any more expensive if needed. Something like 5930k is relatively cheap on the market and gives you 40 PCIe lanes to work with (X16, X8, X8, X8), X99 motherboards with 4 GPU slots are not hard to find. Power cost would be around 3,000 € yearly (at 30 cents per kWh) and half that if you live in one of those countries where a kWh costs 15 cents. You would have to deal with noise and 1 KW heat though. And it takes half a day to build.

But no "processing heavy" company can do that, becasue they don't need one, they need 100. So then they need a datacenter to put them in that costs more than the machines themselves, and have to have the people to do the maintenance and upgrades on them. 

And the big thing that makes things go in the cloud is that with how things work nowadays today they need 100, tomorrow they need 1000, but a week later they only need 200. Cloud scales instantly, doesn't need space or maintenance on your end, and is never costing you money when you don't need the power.

 

This obviously isn't about one personal rig for folding, nobody ever said it was. It's never going to be cost effective for an individual, but for a company heck yeah.

[ShortRouter]

3 minutes ago, ObeliskAG said:

While I would agree that there are TCO benefits for having servers in a data centre that can provide 2N+1 power and cooling, "Cloud" simply means "other peoples computers". What cloud provides business is convenience (because upgrading your NetApp has become an ongoing PITA), but make no mistake that this approach often costs more than doing things in-house. The trick with in-house, is maintaining the skills. Like most things in life, your specific needs will determine the best solution, and that does not always mean the cloud. Recently reviewed an analysis of in-house verses cloud backup. OMG - TCO for cloud was horrific!

Yeahhh I looked AWS and others pricing on 10 TB cloud storage and then bought a Synology NAS. TCO amortization in less than a year, 24 TB of usable redundant storage. And it has tons more features than a simple cloud storage. I have SMB locally, Plex Media Server, OpenVPN server and a Pihole all running on that thing and it doesn't break a sweat.

[DonGuano]

Trying to catch up after my 2080 died, PPD got a huge hit, now 2070S and R3600 is running 24/7...

[ShortRouter]

7 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

But no "processing heavy" company can do that, becasue they don't need one, they need 100. So then they need a datacenter to put them in that costs more than the machines themselves, and have to have the people to do the maintenance and upgrades on them. 

And the big thing that makes things go in the cloud is that with how things work nowadays today they need 100, tomorrow they need 1000, but a week later they only need 200. Cloud scales instantly, doesn't need space or maintenance on your end, and is never costing you money when you don't need the power.

 

This obviously isn't about one personal rig for folding, nobody ever said it was.

I am well aware of the advantages of the cloud. Instant scalability, flexibility, etc. My point being that for a pure folding rig the DIY home solution is way cheaper if that flexibility is not needed and you are planning to run it 24/7 for a year or more.

I was obviously just agreeing to what the guy I quoted said.

[ObeliskAG]

1 minute ago, Kilrah said:

But no "processing heavy" company can do that, becasue they don't need one, they need 100. So then they need a datacenter to put them in that costs more than the machines themselves, and have to have the people to do the maintenance and upgrades on them. 

And the big thing that makes things go in the cloud is that with how things work nowadays today they need 100, tomorrow they need 1000, but a week later they only need 200. Cloud scales instantly, doesn't need space or maintenance on your part, and is never costing you money when you don't need the power.

 

This obviously isn't about one personal rig for folding, nobody ever said it was.

I've worked at a couple of big businesses and it is true that while upgrading systems like an ERP, demand more resources during the transition (use the cloud for these), once the upgrade is ready for production, the final production, testing, training, and dev. environments usually have not grown too much and are just fine in-house (located at a data centre). It is smart do coordinate the hardware refresh cycle so that the upgraded software system is running on newer hardware. Keeping an ERP in the cloud can easily be way more expensive than in-house.

 

Not sure how many businesses need 100, then 1,000, then 200 servers. Sure, the Tokyo Olympic Committee might be such an organization, but they are an exception. Most businesses might need a small-scale temporary increase in hardware for big system upgrades, but that would mean a 40 server ERP system might need 50% more servers for 9 - 18 months, before going back to it's original scale.

[Gustavehomme01]

2 hours ago, ShortRouter said:

My cloud setup will last me less than a week. Free credits ain't much unfortunately. Google Cloud (2x P100 GPU) chunks through 300 $ free budget in 5 days lol. Wanetd to try out some serious cloud servers to freshen up on Linux command line and maybe learn how painful/ painless those services are to work with.

That's not to bad, I must have done something wrong since mine will only last 3.5 days... oh well some is better then nothing. A little under 4.50$ per hour. I did 2 instance with 1 P100 each instead of 1 instance with 2 GPU. Added a few extra dollars but added safety if one hang the other keeps going.

[GalaxyNetworks]

9 minutes ago, ObeliskAG said:

I've worked at a couple of big businesses and it is true that while upgrading systems like an ERP, demand more resources during the transition (use the cloud for these), once the upgrade is ready for production, the final production, testing, training, and dev. environments usually have not grown too much and are just fine in-house (located at a data centre). It is smart do coordinate the hardware refresh cycle so that the upgraded software system is running on newer hardware. Keeping an ERP in the cloud can easily be way more expensive than in-house.

 

Not sure how many businesses need 100, then 1,000, then 200 servers. Sure, the Tokyo Olympic Committee might be such an organization, but they are an exception. Most businesses might need a small-scale temporary increase in hardware for big system upgrades, but that would mean a 40 server ERP system might need 50% more servers for 9 - 18 months, before going back to it's original scale.

It's still a lot cheaper and more reliable to host in the cloud, there's a reason for why companies move everything to the cloud. What happens when your hardware dies? What happens when your ISP dies.

Sure cloud solutions have problems, but with good enough redundancy they're clearly the best bet.

My only reason for on-prem servers are due to customers that wants data kept inside the country. However more and more are starting to accept the cloud as the right choice.

[Shlouski]

30 minutes ago, Macaw2000 said:

I'm willing to bet I'm one of the most efficient, measured by $ TCO, folder here and I'm entirely in the cloud. It's not as fun (no RGB) but your math won't hold up. There's a reason everything went to the cloud.

I will take that bet, Total cost of ownership (TCO), for starters you don't own any of it 

 

You make this statement but don't provide any info making it impossible for anyone to draw any conclusions, please tell me your specs, how much you pay a month and how many ppd you get.

 

I sure there are many reasons for people turning to the cloud, a big one that comes to mind is significantly lower startup costs.

[ObeliskAG]

37 minutes ago, GalaxyNetworks said:

It's still a lot cheaper and more reliable to host in the cloud, there's a reason for why companies move everything to the cloud. What happens when your hardware dies? What happens when your ISP dies.

Sure cloud solutions have problems, but with good enough redundancy they're clearly the best bet.

My only reason for on-prem servers are due to customers that wants data kept inside the country. However more and more are starting to accept the cloud as the right choice.

Don't want to get too much further off topic, so I'll keep it brief:

Cheaper - Got proof to back up your statement? While cloud can be cheaper, it is not a universal truth that it is. Only lazy or incompetent IT leaders believe otherwise.

Hardware dies - All properly designed solutions have redundancy. This is what VMware SRM is for.

ISP - Redundant links from multiple ISPs to the data centre, so a single ISP outage is not an issue.

GDPR - Even before this, compliance was an issue. Eg. Until recently Microsoft would only geolocate Office365 for customers with 5,000 or more users. Still an issue with the cloud.

 

Businesses are paying more to have convenience and cash flow management (reduced capex), not an overall lower TCO.

 

To be fair, if you are Norwegian, I can see that TCO calculations favour non-Norwegian cloud services.

[Andre Lamarche]

R7 2700  16 gig ram and 2x 1070 TI . i have to say that i dont have  to heat the house and actuly have to  open windows to let the cold air (8C outside) come in.  the funny  thing  is even everithing run to  near 100% (95-97%)i can still play  games but i did  some tweak . force the cpu at 3.725 gig and under volt it to 1.15 volt  so temps  stay in control (for the last month 24\7 no crash) , gpu the EVGA 1070TI hybrid SC do  well  but the Turbo-GTX1070TI  from Asus i had to force a limit max temps in afterburner of 72C otherwise the blower on that thing ... the noise...

surprisingly i have  not noticed any lag or drop FPS @ 1080p 60 fps (i play on my TV) also all games still run (ultra/very high) smootly whit  Foldding@home running at 100% in background .

 *im waiting for my Be Quiet! Dark Rock Pro 4 for better  clock on CPU and temps

 

 

soon ill get  my 10k certificat

[Kilrah]

Ouch, got a WU that failed to upload to work server, switched to backup collection server and that took 6 minutes to upload 30MB to...

[ShortRouter]

23 minutes ago, GalaxyNetworks said:

What happens when your ISP dies.

Well then you would lose access to all your cloud services but still have all the local servers available

For redundancy, you should have offsite backups of everything important either way. Can use a mix of own servers + cloud backup or own backup servers at another site. Companies completely dependant on stable internet connection have multiple ISPs with a dedicated fibre each along with redundant routers. You should have that ESPECIALLY if all your stuff runs in the cloud.

[Andre Lamarche]

Kilrah  yea it happen some time also to get  work  fail alot to connect

 

[Inkertus]

Oh yeah 3 million by the way.  I think I'm averaging 1m non-boosted every 5-6 days? 

 

[Macaw2000]

12 minutes ago, Shlouski said:

I will take that bet, Total cost of ownership (TCO), for starters you don't own any of it 

 

You make this statement but don't provide any info making it impossible for anyone to draw any conclusions, please tell me your specs, how much you pay a month and how many ppd you get.

 

I sure there are many reasons for people turning to the cloud, a big one that comes to mind is significantly lower startup costs.

 

I realized I'm in a forum with people who love building awesome, custom PCs and servers. Probably not the right place for me to debate this. I don't want to detract from anyone's fun. 

[Andre Lamarche]

1 of 3   on average   is Covid related

[Inkertus]

2 minutes ago, Andre Lamarche said:

1 of 3   on average   is Covid related

 

Huh.  "bad" luck?  All 6 of mine are COVID. currently anyway.

[Shlouski]

19 minutes ago, GalaxyNetworks said:

It's still a lot cheaper

 

Then provide examples please.

 

4 minutes ago, ObeliskAG said:

more reliable to host in the cloud

 

Why???

 

If my devices are on my lan then they can be used online and offline, versus only online. Also I trust myself more to look out for my own interests, meaning I making sure things work well, are maintained well and problems can be fixed quickly.

 

25 minutes ago, GalaxyNetworks said:

What happens when your hardware dies?

 

Send it back to be fixed because you get 2 years minimum warranty or more depending on the manufacture. Also a large amount of the cost can be recouped by sell old hardware.

 

30 minutes ago, GalaxyNetworks said:

there's a reason for why companies move everything to the cloud.

 

I'm sure there are, but not necessarily because its cheaper.

[ShortRouter]

12 minutes ago, Macaw2000 said:

 

I realized I'm in a forum with people who love building awesome, custom PCs and servers. Probably not the right place for me to debate this. I don't want to detract from anyone's fun. 

It's not that, it's we need data to compare apples with apples. For long-term folding cloud makes no sence, for fast growing businesses that need scalable infrastructure with changing demands cloud is awesome. Both solutions have pros and cons and many many factors that ultimaletly decide which one to choose. Some services even cater to gamers specifically who don't want to get their hands dirty. They provide idiot-proof turnkey cloud game servers optimized for specific games where you only choose the game and number of players that will play on the server. Installation and setup is fully automated via script and you get a clean Plesk control panel.

[Andre Lamarche]

Cloud  is good  for ppl that dont wanna deal whit physical reliability of the system

[Inkertus]

7 minutes ago, ShortRouter said:

It's not that, it's we need data to compare apples with apples. For long-term folding cloud makes no sence, for fast growing businesses that need scalable infrastructure with changing demands cloud is awesome. Both solutions have pros and cons and many many factors that ultimaletly decide which one to choose.

My cloud computing class taught me that there are pros and cons to each side and that it's specific case on if it's cheaper or better (more redundancy/reliability/failover can make it a lot more expensive monthly).  Most cases it's hybrid and the important stuff is kept on-site and the stuff you may need to scale is cloud-side.  Biggest upsides to cloud are 1) effectively infinitely scaleable and 2) it's cheaper to start up with it than keep long term (it also depends on your config).  If you do both right you don't end up with a lot of hardware at the end of it (to sell or upgrade) and keep the flexibility you need to do business with relatively few issues.

[ShortRouter]

2 minutes ago, Inkertus said:

My cloud computing class taught me that there are pros and cons to each side and that it's specific case on if it's cheaper or better (more redundancy/reliability/failover can make it a lot more expensive monthly).  Most cases it's hybrid and the important stuff is kept on-site and the stuff you may need to scale is cloud-side.  Biggest upsides to cloud are 1) effectively infinitely scaleable and 2) it's cheaper to start up with it than keep long term.  If you do both right you don't end up with a lot of hardware at the end of it (to sell or upgrade) and keep the flexibility you need to do business with relatively few issues.

Same. I remember slides with different cloud computing service models. With own hardware you are always fully responsible for everything and you are your own support. Any company without IT division is fucked if they have hardware they don't know how to troubleshoot and maintain. Some bigger businesses like to hoard own servers and keep everything under their roof until they get "too big" for that. Funny how that works.