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I am researching possibilities of occasional using of cloud computing (a container or a virtual machine) for CA simulations; and whether it could be cheaper/better for me than trying to buy a small, relatively silent, linux server and running it at home.

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Previous discussion(s):

Dylan Chen wrote: June 11th, 2020, 1:09 am ... Cloud computing companies located in China like Tencent\Alibaba\Telecom offer a very attractive price in student offer,10￥ per month or 95-115￥ per year (single core instance).That approximatly 1.4USD/month and 13-16USD/year.
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I am going to read about the paid variant of https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html
and also about the Golem Project https://golem.network/

EDIT: For now, Colab Pro is only available in the US.

EDIT: another possibility https://cocalc.com/policies/pricing.html

EDIT: 2021: Vast.ai https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearnin ... al_vastai/

Problem1:
in cloud computing, can I set a hard limit , how much will I have to pay?

I should use a 2FA, to reduce the danger, that someone cracks (hacks) my cloud account.

But what if there would be malware in the software packages that I am using.

EDIT1: maybe I underestimated this problem.
I naively believed, that data science VMs are quite different from webserver VMs.
Now I realized, that even a data science VM needs 1 open port ... SSH.

(BTW, about trying to limit the max. cost of a cloud-based webserver at AWS ... that case is much discussed at Quora.)

EDIT2: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/ ... ed-charges
https://ideas.digitalocean.com/ideas/CPX-I-28

martin.novy wrote: August 23rd, 2020, 11:58 am Problem1:
in cloud computing, can I set a hard limit , how much will I have to pay? ... in the case if someone cracks (hacks) my cloud account, and e.g. starts mining bitcoins ?

I understand, that for my case (computations), it should be much simpler, than trying to limit the cost of a cloud-based, public-facing, webserver (that case is much discussed e.g. at Quora).

My limited experience with running spaceship searches on the "free tier" of Microsoft Azure is that once you use up your monthly allotment of CPU time, you get suggestions that you should upgrade to continue / avoid losing your virtual-machine setup. But you can arrange it so that you can't run up a bill beyond the limit amount: without a payment agreement in place, Microsoft just won't do the work.

martin.novy wrote: August 23rd, 2020, 10:32 am I am researching possibilities of occasional using of cloud computing (a container or a virtual machine) for CA simulations; and whether it could be cheaper/better for me than trying to buy a small, relatively silent, linux server and running it at home.

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Generally, I'd prefer remote server instead of running at home. Massive computing makes noise and abundant heat, which is anoying ( especially in summer).

Those error-tolerable and distributable computing programmes like APGsearch works well on Cloud. I rent several 1Core-2G instance for 3 month or 12 month. My page on Catagolue gol.hatsya.co.uk/user/inspirehep@gmail.com shows the work.

The fantastic point of cloud is that you can have unimaginable compute resouces at the moment you pay. 32Cores CPUs or Tesla T4 is availble at anytime.

If you do need those 1Core tiny server, contact me (via Email or discord or sth) . I'll send a SSH account to you.


have a nice day!



Edit. recently, I found the spot price instance of a local provider is highly easy to use. it provides 16 vitual core & 32GB instance, and a NAS system that could be used as a shared HDD.

Dylan Chen wrote: February 6th, 2021, 5:01 am My search 'tool' is some rented cloud machines, at spot price.
Recent days，I found that their NAS has the same speed to an HDD (R/W at 150+MB/s) , and the speed will increase linearly with the total storage, so I could get 200+MB/s when the LSSS data folder reach 300GB.
The NAS can be attached to multiply machines.

the finding of Anura & Soba (3c7 spaceship)is from those machines.