Free Trials of GPU Cloud Computing Resources

NBtarheel_33 · 2012-03-15, 10:35

There are several cloud computing sites that offer free trials of their high performance hardware, including multi-core systems with heaps of RAM and high-end (e.g. Fermi and Tesla) GPUs. I thought that GIMPSters might enjoy checking out the opportunity to play around with some high end machinery and perhaps boost their rankings, if only for a day or two...

Hoopoe Cloud Services for GPU Computing @ http://www.hoopoe-cloud.com/ is presently starting up their services, and from what the home page says, they are about to enter an Alpha testing phase, where it looks like ALL of their services (including systems with 8x Xeon X5482 cores and 4x Tesla S1070 GPUs and 32GB RAM) will be FREE for the entire month or so that Alpha testing is underway! If this offer is really what it looks to be, this could provide a major boost to GIMPS albeit for a brief period of time. I have registered with Hoopoe, but they are still "reviewing my information", so I have not yet had access to machines, nor have I confirmed the details of the Alpha testing offer. But it sure looks promising.

Sabalcore @ www.sabalcore.com is offering a free trial of their HPC resources. You get 500 core-hours to be used within 30 days. NVidia GPUs are available here too, on clusters that feature Xeon 64-bit nodes, as well as AMD 4x socket 64-bit nodes.

I am keeping an eye out for more. As other HPC hosts launch, there are sure to be more free trial opportunities. Unfortunately, Amazon's EC2 does not offer anything for free beyond their simplest 1-core Linux box with 512MB RAM. That is free for a year, however, so I suppose you could probably get a couple DCs out of it, if not a whole LL.

NBtarheel_33 · 2012-03-15, 10:43

In thinking about some of these start-ups, e.g. Hoopoe, I wonder if they would be interested in a "case study" type of relationship with GIMPS, a la Scott's gift of the first PrimeNet being a (successful) pitch for Entropia.

In fact, seeing as how GIMPS has been incorporated as a charitable organization (and hence any donations to GIMPS have tax advantages), I wonder if any of the HPC firms out there would be interested in donating a few hours of hardware time here and there as a publicity booster. Seems like they might get at least an interesting whitepaper out of it.

NBtarheel_33 · 2012-03-16, 07:54

HP Cloud Services @ http://www.hpcloud.com/ is yet another HPC start-up that is presently beta-testing their services and hardware platform. Everything is free to play with during the beta test! None of their systems seem to have GPUs (yet), but they will have systems that have 8 cores and 32 GB of RAM. Under the free beta, you can have up to 10 such instances, so that would be 80 cores to work with.

Registration is required, and they ask you to explain how you would make use of the services during the beta. I wrote the below description of our project and submitted it, so it might work if other GIMPSters simply mention that they are part of the GIMPS project and interested in running tests on well-endowed compute instances. Good luck!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

How will you use HP Cloud Services?

I participate in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) (see www.mersenne.org for more information), a distributed computing project that is actively testing multi-million-digit numbers of the form 2^p-1 (p prime) for primality, by making use of the Lucas-Lehmer (LL) primality test. GIMPS' founder, George Woltman, has implemented the LL test as a program called Prime95, which makes use of Woltman's libraries for large-integer multiplication (the fastest such libraries in the world) as well as the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Presently, the GIMPS volunteer distributed computing network comprises well over half a million computers, and over fifty thousand users. If the GIMPS network were a single supercomputer, it would rank in the Top 500; presently GIMPS sustains between 70 and 80 trillion floating point operations per second.

Since 1996, GIMPS has been responsible for the discovery of the last twelve Mersenne primes, including the prime number 2^43112609-1, which was discovered by a GIMPS user's computer in the late summer of 2008, and which is presently the largest known prime number, by far. This astronomical number of almost thirteen million digits won GIMPS the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) $100,000 prize for the first discovered prime of length more than ten million digits. Presently, some GIMPS contributors are testing numbers of length one hundred million digits, as the EFF has offered yet another prize (this time $150,000) for the first discovered prime of this size. Typically, however, GIMPS users test exponents in a more or less sequential fashion, starting below exponent 1000000 in 1996, and progressing today to exponents near 60000000.

As one would expect, the computations performed by GIMPS are extreme, and make the highest demands on even the "bleeding edge" of compute technology. The most common LL tests conducted by GIMPS today require weeks to be completed even on the newest Intel and AMD chips. It is for this reason that Woltman has added support to Prime95 for multi-core systems, and that several GIMPS participants have developed LL testing software for CUDA-enabled GPUs. Using multiple cores or, better yet, the GPU, can shrink the time required for an LL test of an exponent in the 60 million range from weeks to a few days. Moreover, since GIMPS initially applies the Pollard P-1 factorization algorithm to most numbers in hopes of finding a relatively "cheap" factor that saves weeks of computation, and since the P-1 algorithm benefits from systems with high available RAM, the ability to make use of systems endowed with large quantities of RAM is extremely beneficial to GIMPS, as it allows the project to judiciously dispense with Mersenne numbers that have a factor, and hence cannot be prime.

I (and perhaps other members of GIMPS) am therefore interested in making use of HP Cloud Services to experiment with running LL tests on systems with large numbers of cores and high RAM, in hopes of more quickly enabling our project to make its thirteenth Mersenne prime discovery and continue to enjoy a proud position in the annals of mathematical history. At the same time, GIMPS can provide feedback to your organization on the usability and strength of its HPC platform, as well as provide extensive hardware testing (our project is quite rare in that it is absolutely unforgiving of errors: one error in the millions of operations required for one LL test can completely invalidate the result!). Indeed, many computing enthusiasts make a secondary use of Prime95 as a stress testing program for new systems; there are countless Web sites devoted to ideas and information regarding such.

Thank you for your consideration, and I look forward to being able to make use of beta access to HP Cloud Services in my work for the GIMPS project. To access more information on the project, please visit www.mersenne.org or www.mersenneforum.org.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

retina · 2012-03-16, 08:00

A problem I foresee is: who owns the result if one of their computers finds something significant? You would need a proper contract of some type to avoid any potential disagreement.

IME free things often cost the most.

NBtarheel_33 · 2012-03-16, 08:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by retina

A problem I foresee is: who owns the result if one of their computers finds something significant? You would need a proper contract of some type to avoid any potential disagreement.

IME free things often cost the most.

I imagine that the user keeps the rights to anything generated on the systems, especially since the data stored on the systems belongs to the user as long as the systems "belong" to the user (this is probably part of the Terms of Use/Terms of Service that one would encounter upon sign-up or activation of a compute instance). For instance, there are examples of universities using the systems for research, or meteorological agencies using the systems for weather modeling. I doubt that the HPC providers would have any claim on the results of the research (even if it happened to be the Next Big Thing(TM)) or the weather forecasts.

It is true, however, that this is something that one might want to look into before proceeding with various providers. Thanks for bringing it up.

cheesehead · 2012-03-16, 12:45

Quote:

Originally Posted by NBtarheel_33

I imagine that the user keeps the rights to anything generated on the systems,

But the GIMPS software license terms explicitly require that EFF prize money be split according to a GIMPS-specified formula.

If this will cause trouble, then perhaps just do P-1 ... and DCs (where EFF money is unlikely)! Want to see the DC wavefront fly?

Quote:

It is true, however, that this is something that one might want to look into before proceeding with various providers. Thanks for bringing it up.

Yes, indeedy.

NBtarheel_33 · 2012-03-17, 06:46

Quote:

Originally Posted by cheesehead

But the GIMPS software license terms explicitly require that EFF prize money be split according to a GIMPS-specified formula.

1. I don't think that there is enough time in the free trials of any of these providers to really be thinking about testing EFF-prize-eligible numbers. In fact, 500 core-hours (even on a single core) is probably not even enough to test a single LL candidate of the typical size these days. So prize money, let alone finding new primes, is probably a shot long enough to dismiss as a real concern.

2. As far as I can tell, whether free or paid for, once you have the rights to a node or nodes of one of these providers, they have no idea (nor do they care to have such) of what you are doing with the node(s) (presumably as long as it is legal and not injurious to the provider or their hardware), and as long as it is within their Terms of Service or User License Agreement. As I said, you could be forecasting the weather, running complex stats calculations in R, designing a Web site, or hunting for primes. If any of these activities happen to lead to money/fame/chocolate covered pretzels, it seems as though it should not matter to the provider one way or the other. Doubly so in the case where the user *pays* for the compute time.

Quote:

Originally Posted by cheesehead

If this will cause trouble, then perhaps just do P-1 ... and DCs (where EFF money is unlikely)! Want to see the DC wavefront fly?

P-1 on a system with >32 GB RAM would be especially fun. I wonder just how high the Brent-Suyama E can go?

Uncwilly · 2012-03-17, 18:02

Why not run some T-F on them.

Brianbrooks · 2013-07-29, 09:11

If you want to try one another company for cloud computing free trial services then you may try at http://www.cloudpeople.com.au/cloud-computing. I got my cloud computing free trial from that website without any terms and conditions but for seven days only.

lycorn · 2013-07-31, 15:32

Quote:

Originally Posted by retina

IME free things often cost the most.

Definitely.

As in: "The cheapest sex is the one you pay for"

2012-03-15, 10:35	#1
NBtarheel_33 "Nathan" Jul 2008 Maryland, USA 5×223 Posts	Free Trials of GPU Cloud Computing Resources There are several cloud computing sites that offer free trials of their high performance hardware, including multi-core systems with heaps of RAM and high-end (e.g. Fermi and Tesla) GPUs. I thought that GIMPSters might enjoy checking out the opportunity to play around with some high end machinery and perhaps boost their rankings, if only for a day or two... Hoopoe Cloud Services for GPU Computing @ http://www.hoopoe-cloud.com/ is presently starting up their services, and from what the home page says, they are about to enter an Alpha testing phase, where it looks like ALL of their services (including systems with 8x Xeon X5482 cores and 4x Tesla S1070 GPUs and 32GB RAM) will be FREE for the entire month or so that Alpha testing is underway! If this offer is really what it looks to be, this could provide a major boost to GIMPS albeit for a brief period of time. I have registered with Hoopoe, but they are still "reviewing my information", so I have not yet had access to machines, nor have I confirmed the details of the Alpha testing offer. But it sure looks promising. Sabalcore @ www.sabalcore.com is offering a free trial of their HPC resources. You get 500 core-hours to be used within 30 days. NVidia GPUs are available here too, on clusters that feature Xeon 64-bit nodes, as well as AMD 4x socket 64-bit nodes. I am keeping an eye out for more. As other HPC hosts launch, there are sure to be more free trial opportunities. Unfortunately, Amazon's EC2 does not offer anything for free beyond their simplest 1-core Linux box with 512MB RAM. That is free for a year, however, so I suppose you could probably get a couple DCs out of it, if not a whole LL.

2012-03-16, 07:54	#3
NBtarheel_33 "Nathan" Jul 2008 Maryland, USA 1115₁₀ Posts	Free Private Beta at HP Cloud! HP Cloud Services @ http://www.hpcloud.com/ is yet another HPC start-up that is presently beta-testing their services and hardware platform. Everything is free to play with during the beta test! None of their systems seem to have GPUs (yet), but they will have systems that have 8 cores and 32 GB of RAM. Under the free beta, you can have up to 10 such instances, so that would be 80 cores to work with. Registration is required, and they ask you to explain how you would make use of the services during the beta. I wrote the below description of our project and submitted it, so it might work if other GIMPSters simply mention that they are part of the GIMPS project and interested in running tests on well-endowed compute instances. Good luck! ----------------------------------------------------------------------- How will you use HP Cloud Services? I participate in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) (see www.mersenne.org for more information), a distributed computing project that is actively testing multi-million-digit numbers of the form 2^p-1 (p prime) for primality, by making use of the Lucas-Lehmer (LL) primality test. GIMPS' founder, George Woltman, has implemented the LL test as a program called Prime95, which makes use of Woltman's libraries for large-integer multiplication (the fastest such libraries in the world) as well as the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Presently, the GIMPS volunteer distributed computing network comprises well over half a million computers, and over fifty thousand users. If the GIMPS network were a single supercomputer, it would rank in the Top 500; presently GIMPS sustains between 70 and 80 trillion floating point operations per second. Since 1996, GIMPS has been responsible for the discovery of the last twelve Mersenne primes, including the prime number 2^43112609-1, which was discovered by a GIMPS user's computer in the late summer of 2008, and which is presently the largest known prime number, by far. This astronomical number of almost thirteen million digits won GIMPS the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) $100,000 prize for the first discovered prime of length more than ten million digits. Presently, some GIMPS contributors are testing numbers of length one hundred million digits, as the EFF has offered yet another prize (this time $150,000) for the first discovered prime of this size. Typically, however, GIMPS users test exponents in a more or less sequential fashion, starting below exponent 1000000 in 1996, and progressing today to exponents near 60000000. As one would expect, the computations performed by GIMPS are extreme, and make the highest demands on even the "bleeding edge" of compute technology. The most common LL tests conducted by GIMPS today require weeks to be completed even on the newest Intel and AMD chips. It is for this reason that Woltman has added support to Prime95 for multi-core systems, and that several GIMPS participants have developed LL testing software for CUDA-enabled GPUs. Using multiple cores or, better yet, the GPU, can shrink the time required for an LL test of an exponent in the 60 million range from weeks to a few days. Moreover, since GIMPS initially applies the Pollard P-1 factorization algorithm to most numbers in hopes of finding a relatively "cheap" factor that saves weeks of computation, and since the P-1 algorithm benefits from systems with high available RAM, the ability to make use of systems endowed with large quantities of RAM is extremely beneficial to GIMPS, as it allows the project to judiciously dispense with Mersenne numbers that have a factor, and hence cannot be prime. I (and perhaps other members of GIMPS) am therefore interested in making use of HP Cloud Services to experiment with running LL tests on systems with large numbers of cores and high RAM, in hopes of more quickly enabling our project to make its thirteenth Mersenne prime discovery and continue to enjoy a proud position in the annals of mathematical history. At the same time, GIMPS can provide feedback to your organization on the usability and strength of its HPC platform, as well as provide extensive hardware testing (our project is quite rare in that it is absolutely unforgiving of errors: one error in the millions of operations required for one LL test can completely invalidate the result!). Indeed, many computing enthusiasts make a secondary use of Prime95 as a stress testing program for new systems; there are countless Web sites devoted to ideas and information regarding such. Thank you for your consideration, and I look forward to being able to make use of beta access to HP Cloud Services in my work for the GIMPS project. To access more information on the project, please visit www.mersenne.org or www.mersenneforum.org. -----------------------------------------------------------------------

2012-03-16, 08:00	#4
retina Undefined "The unspeakable one" Jun 2006 My evil lair 2·19·163 Posts	A problem I foresee is: who owns the result if one of their computers finds something significant? You would need a proper contract of some type to avoid any potential disagreement. IME free things often cost the most. Last fiddled with by retina on 2012-03-16 at 08:01 Reason: grammar

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2012-03-15, 10:43	#2
NBtarheel_33 "Nathan" Jul 2008 Maryland, USA 5·223 Posts	In thinking about some of these start-ups, e.g. Hoopoe, I wonder if they would be interested in a "case study" type of relationship with GIMPS, a la Scott's gift of the first PrimeNet being a (successful) pitch for Entropia. In fact, seeing as how GIMPS has been incorporated as a charitable organization (and hence any donations to GIMPS have tax advantages), I wonder if any of the HPC firms out there would be interested in donating a few hours of hardware time here and there as a publicity booster. Seems like they might get at least an interesting whitepaper out of it.

2012-03-17, 18:02	#8
Uncwilly 6809 > 6502 """"""""""""""""""" Aug 2003 101×103 Posts 2³×1,223 Posts	Why not run some T-F on them.

2013-07-29, 09:11	#9
Brianbrooks Jul 2013 1 Posts	If you want to try one another company for cloud computing free trial services then you may try at http://www.cloudpeople.com.au/cloud-computing. I got my cloud computing free trial from that website without any terms and conditions but for seven days only.