Nokra Posted May 12, 2020 Share Posted May 12, 2020 I'm completing my master's thesis and of course two weeks before my deadline, the server from the university crashed and I quite possibly lost two weeks worth of work. I'm considering my options now to see if I could redo the work in a shorter time by paying for time on a better server. I'm running some artificial evolution software (Aevol) which is highly parallelized. It isn't too resource intensive as far as RAM goes, but it will use as many CPUs/threads as you can throw at it. I would need whatever cluster to let me run Ubuntu 18.04. The university server I was using was running 16 cores and it still was taking about two weeks for the experiments to complete, so any improvement over this is great. I was getting so desperate, I was even considering buying a 3950x (16 cores, 32 threads) and building my own server since I was wanting to build a new gaming computer anyway, but it seems like pretty much all of the decent motherboards for that CPU are sold out. Probably it's better for my wallet this way. Does anyone here have any experience renting time on a cluster? If so, which company would you go with, and what do you think I could expect to pay for (ideally) 32 or more CPUs for about a week? Is an AWS EC2 instance likely all I would need, for example? This is all very new to me so I appreciate any information you all can give. Thank you! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Commissar SFLUFAN Posted May 13, 2020 Share Posted May 13, 2020 I'm afraid that my server rental experience is pretty much limited to the "Prepare Your Anus" TF2 server! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cusideabelincoln Posted May 13, 2020 Share Posted May 13, 2020 I have zero experience as well, but it looks like an Amazon service will fit the bill, particularly one of the Compute (c5) instances which they can offer up to 96 cores. I'd say your other alternative is Microsoft, which can offer 120 AMD Epyc core: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/windows/ These services are popular so I can imagine that both Microsoft and Amazon have made the entire process user friendly and simple, with plenty of support should you need it. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nokra Posted May 15, 2020 Author Share Posted May 15, 2020 I ended up going with an Amazon Web Services C5 server just because I had already looked into that one and knew more or less what I was getting into there, but thank you @cusideabelincoln! I have my experiments running on an AWS server with 96 cores (had to contact customer support to get special permission to get that many ) and the experiment that was taking just over 14 days on the university server (with 16 cores) is probably going to complete in 3.5 days on the AWS server. Thank you all! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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