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Hourly billing for Xeon Phi VMs?
Anyone aware of any place offering hourly billing for Xeon Phi virtual machines? I searched for awhile and couldn't find anything, although I'm willing to admit that perhaps my Google-fu is not as strong as it could be.
I'm aware that GPGPU is more efficient, but would like to see how the existing codebase works before committing to CUDA.
Comments
I had a google around, could not find anything either.
Looked them up on ark and figured they'd list for $10K each but they're really not much more expensive than E5s, e.g.:
https://ark.intel.com/products/94033/Intel-Xeon-Phi-Processor-7210-16GB-1_30-GHz-64-core
No virt support, though I imagine in this market segment that's irrelevant.
I thought Phi's are co-processors? I imagine you would need a VMware or Xen based VPS for supported passthrough, although the segment for this sort of kit is likely near zero for VPS use cases so its probably worth going direct to CUDA unless you want to drop several hundred on leasing a server for a month.
We've looked at the odd CPUs such as this and AMD's but its just going to be people spinning them up to test then destroying them.
The newer ones are socketed like any old CPU, the people who want these types of insanely parallelized CPUs don't want to waste a PCI slot for it, since that could be a GPU instead, which absolutely blows any CPU, even a phi, out of the water.
Ah ok, thanks for the clarification.
The only possible use I can see for these Xeon Phis is to compliment a GPU because in most uses I can see, an E5 is almost as good and in some cases (i.e. using smaller data sets) the E5 is better.
Provider still gets money for it
But the ROI is horrible unless you get some real clients.
Maybe check the geekbench-type sites? See if any of the tests with that CPU have some hints as to the provider in the test name.