amuck-landowner

High Volume CPU VPS

HalfEatenPie

The Irrational One
Retired Staff
Yeah we dislike all these requests for high volume CPUs but hear me out on this one.

This is the spec I need:

8 CPU Cores (minimum, more is preferred) at 2.0 GHz minimum

512 MB RAM (1GB Preferred) (KVM because I don't think OpenVZ works for this)

20 GB HDD (An installation of Ubuntu and some calculation files)

20 GB Bandwidth (Just uploading and pulling small files here and there)

Location: Anywhere Cheap

Reasoning: I need a temporary VM with high CPU usage for one week.  This high CPU usage is estimated to be about 3-4 hours about six times on the span of two-three-ish days (but could be longer).  No malicious intent, it's just that previously my dedicated servers used to be running these calculations but one of them is giving me grief and I'm almost done with everything I need.  

This will be running CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) Modeling software.  Specifically, I'll be using OpenFOAM (http://openfoam.com).  

To show an example of what I'm doing: http://imgur.com/a/ekwtP#0 (this is a very basic model that I can generate in a few seconds)

Each of those squares is a single cell, and a calculation based on what the water/fluid is doing in that square is done for each time at each iteration.  Therefore, the need for large computational power (CPU cores).

Tell me what price you guys are willing to give this for me.  I'll pay for a full month if required.

Thanks!
 
Last edited by a moderator:

HalfEatenPie

The Irrational One
Retired Staff
Amazon? They have high CPU computing instances, hourly billing, etc.
That's actually something I probably should have considered.  Thanks.

How much is your budget?

Well you have to go with Dedi to be honest.
Yeah as I stated earlier, previously I was doing this all through dedicated servers but a situation as risen where I'd prefer to see if I can get a VM for a short time (roughly a week) instead of paying a full month of dedicated server costs (setup + rent + cancellation/etc = bigger headache).  

I mean if it's possible via VPS (which I'd prefer) then fantastic.  If not then I guess I'll be left with a need for another dedicated server. 

Edit:  Oh I forgot to answer the budget question.  In reality, I have set no budget.  I don't know how much people want me to pay for full use of 8 cores for short periods of time.  I'd prefer if it was below dedicated server costs but I'll weigh my options depending on what offers I can see.  
 
Last edited by a moderator:

willie

Active Member
You need a dedicated server.  Amazon has what amounts to them, but will be ridiculously expensive.  You might look at uptano.com (single tenant VPS node, billed by the hour) which I've played with and which works pretty well, though a week on Uptano might cost as much as a month on OVH (or a day on Amazon).  Keep in mind that recent x86 servers are much faster per core than older ones.  A 4-core E3-1230 is faster than an older 8-core box.

Renting for a month from OVH is no big deal.  There's no setup charge, provisioning is almost as simple as a VPS, and you don't have to cancel, just don't renew at the end of the month.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

HalfEatenPie

The Irrational One
Retired Staff
Amazon? They have high CPU computing instances, hourly billing, etc.
Alright clarification on Amazon.  They only give you one virtual core.  Not really what I'm specifically looking for.

You need a dedicated server.  Amazon has what amounts to them, but will be ridiculously expensive.  You might look at uptano.com (single tenant VPS node, billed by the hour) which I've played with and which works pretty well, though a week on Uptano might cost as much as a month on OVH (or a day on Amazon).  Keep in mind that recent x86 servers are much faster per core than older ones.  A 4-core E3-1230 is faster than an older 8-core box.

Renting for a month from OVH is no big deal.  There's no setup charge, provisioning is almost as simple as a VPS, and you don't have to cancel, just don't renew at the end of the month.
Yep that's what I'm expecting I'll have to do but I thought might as well ask around see if anyone else has anything I can snag for a week instead of having to pay for an entire month :p (not the best reasoning but meh, faster to deploy)
 

rds100

New Member
Verified Provider
Alright clarification on Amazon.  They only give you one virtual core.  Not really what I'm specifically looking for.
Look at the C3. type instances

  • c3.large: 3.75 GiB of memory, 2 vCPUs, 7 EC2 Compute Units, 32 GB of SSD-based local instance storage, 64-bit platform
  • c3.xlarge: 7 GiB of memory, 4 vCPUs, 14 EC2 Compute Units, 80 GB of SSD-based local instance storage, 64-bit platform
  • c3.2xlarge: 15 GiB of memory, 8 vCPUs, 28 EC2 Compute Units, 160 GB of SSD-based local instance storage, 64-bit platform
  • c3.4xlarge: 30 GiB of memory, 16 vCPUs, 55 EC2 Compute Units, 320 GB of SSD-based local instance storage, 64-bit platform
  • c3.8xlarge: 60 GiB of memory, 32 vCPUs, 108 EC2 Compute Units, 640 GB of SSD-based local instance storage, 64-bit platform
Also there was a coupon for $100 free Amazon credit floating somewhere...
 

willie

Active Member
Reasoning: I need a temporary VM with high CPU usage for one week.  This high CPU usage is estimated to be about 3-4 hours about six times on the span of two-three-ish days (but could be longer).

If you only really need 2-3 days (maybe spread across more than one session) uptano.com might look a bit better.  Their 8-core box costs 23 cents an hour.  It is basically a dedicated server preconfigured to run VPS's so you don't have to go through a cumbersome dedi provisioning process.  You really can spin it up, do stuff, and shut it down in an hour.

I don't think it's feasible to compute like you're describing on normal VPS, but who knows.

Can you use a local workstation?
 

HalfEatenPie

The Irrational One
Retired Staff
Reasoning: I need a temporary VM with high CPU usage for one week.  This high CPU usage is estimated to be about 3-4 hours about six times on the span of two-three-ish days (but could be longer).

If you only really need 2-3 days (maybe spread across more than one session) uptano.com might look a bit better.  Their 8-core box costs 23 cents an hour.  It is basically a dedicated server preconfigured to run VPS's so you don't have to go through a cumbersome dedi provisioning process.  You really can spin it up, do stuff, and shut it down in an hour.

I don't think it's feasible to compute like you're describing on normal VPS, but who knows.

Can you use a local workstation?
Hm... actually pretty interesting thanks.  I'll look into this.

Unfortunately because this is more of a "temporary" means our research team doesn't have our own workstation/cluster (nor really do we want to invest the proper funds).  

And I'd prefer to pay a little extra and get this thing done quickly/faster instead of waiting for a week for a single calculation to pull through (a small part of our calculations running on 1 core took 8 hours to accomplish...).  
 
Top
amuck-landowner