Thunder Compute

Infrastructure

remote gpu access

SHOW HN2024

344points
108comments
#158of 3,515 in 2024
Top 5%of 2024 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

16 positive, 38 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 19 critical, out of 73 comments about the project. Thread score -0.08.

Idea: 7 for, 10 againstPerformance: 2 for, 4 againstPricing: 2 for, 2 againstExecution: 1 for, 1 againstDocs: 0 for, 2 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Useful for GPU-heavy dev work while keeping CPU instances cheap

    From 2 comments
    • it's more transparent to your system, for example, if you have a gui application that needs gpu acceleration on a thin client (Matlab, solidworks, blender), you can do so without…
      billconan on HN
    • I develop GPU accelerated web apps in an EC2 instance with a remote VSCode session. A lot of the time I’m just doing web dev and don’t need a GPU. I can save thousands per month…
      teaearlgraycold on HN
  • Interesting idea for remote GPU use

    From 2 comments
    • this is nuts
      bkitano19 on HN
    • In 2008, I had a powerful server with XEON CPU, but the motherboard had no slots for a graphics card. I also had a computer with a powerful graphics card but a weak Core 2 Duo. I…
      ellis0n on HN

Objections

  • Network latency and bandwidth make training impractical

    From 3 comments
    • Okay, but your GPUs are in ECS. Don't I just want this feature from Amazon, not you, and natively via Nitro? Or even Google has TPU attachments. > 1. If you're actively…
      doctorpangloss on HN
    • Even a directly attached eGPU via thunderbold 4 was after some time too slow for machine learning aka training. As i work now fully remote i just have a beefy midi tower. Some…
      delijati on HN
    • So won’t that make the network the prohibitive bottle neck? Your memory bandwidth is 1gbps max
      m3kw9 on HN
  • Cheaper to use own GPU or existing cloud GPU instances

    From 3 comments
    • I don't get it. Why would I start an instance in ECS, to use your GPUs in ECS, when I could start an instance for the GPUs I want in ECS? Separately, why would I want half of…
      doctorpangloss on HN
    • Okay, but your GPUs are in ECS. Don't I just want this feature from Amazon, not you, and natively via Nitro? Or even Google has TPU attachments. > 1. If you're actively…
      doctorpangloss on HN
    • Sounds like you can save thousands by just buying a simple GPU card.
      amelius on HN
  • Subscription cloud model is unwelcome

    From 3 comments
    • I am increasingly growing tired of these "cloud" services, paid or not. :/
      johnisgood on HN
    • There is a vast gap between walled garden cloud service rent seeking and giving away software as open source. In the olden days you could buy software licenses to run it wherever…
      rowanG077 on HN
    • I agree. Paying by the month for the rest of your life or they cut you off is not something I am a fan of. I feel sorry for people too young to remember that you could actually…
      mhuffman on HN

Requests

  • Self-hosting option

    From 3 comments
    • This is interesting, but I'm more interested in self-hosting. I already have a lot of GPUs (some running some not.) Does this have a self-hosting option so I can use the GPUs I…
      Cieric on HN
    • Exciting. But would definitely like to see a self hosted option.
      xyst on HN
    • I saw that in the tnr CLI, there are hints of an option to self-host a GPU. Is this going to be a released feature?
      winecamera on HN
  • Vulkan and OpenGL support

    From 2 comments
    • is this a remote nvapi? this is awesome. can it do 3d rendering (vulkan/opengl)
      billconan on HN
    • Thank you! > is this a remote nvapi Essentially yes! Just to be clear, this covers the entire GPU not just the NVAPI (i.e. all of cuda). This functions like you have the physical…
      bmodel on HN
  • Hashcat support

    From 1 comment
    • I’m more interested in using tools like hashcat, any benchmark on these? As the docs link returns error.
      tamimio on HN

Questions

  • How is latency and I/O handled for datasets larger than VRAM

    From 1 comment
    • I'm confused, if this operates at the CPU/GPU boundary doesn't it create a massive I/O bottleneck for any dataset that doesn't fit into VRAM? I'm probably misunderstanding how it…
      radarsat1 on HN
  • Does it work with AMD GPUs and non-CUDA workloads

    From 1 comment
    • What ML packages do you support? In the comments below it says you do not support Vulkan or OpenGL. Does this support AMD GPUs as well?
      rubatuga on HN

Alternatives named

  • Juice Labs

    From 2 comments
    • There is a GPU-over-network software called Juice [1]. I've used it on AWS for running CPU-intensive workloads that also happen to need some GPU without needing to use a huge GPU…
      tommsy64 on HN
    • www.juicelabs.co does all this today, including the GPU sharing and fractionalization.
      goku-goku on HN
  • ffmpeg-over-ip

    From 1 comment
    • Ah this is quite interesting! I had a usecase where I needed a GPU-over-IP but only for transcoding videos. I had a not-so-powerful AMD GPU in my homelab server that somehow kept…
      steelbrain on HN
  • pocl remote backend and qCUDA

    From 1 comment
    • pocl (Portable Computing Language) [1] provides a remote backend [2] that allows for serialization and forwarding of OpenCL commands over a network. Another solution is qCUDA [3]…
      test20240809 on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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