Ask HN: Inexpensive dedicated servers for testing Skylake?

> and it would seem to be in Intel's interest to encourage more research in to how to take full advantage of them.

This seems a little overstated -- we're talking about CPUs that are widely publicly available for around $300 USD, not some big iron.

I don't think it's overstated: Intel would benefit from published research that plays to the strength of their newer processors, and there is a lot of published CS research based on older processors because the researchers don't have access to the newer machines.

The CPU is several hundred dollars, but since it requires a different motherboard and DDR4 RAM, it would be over $1000 to put together a test system to meet our needs. The norm is that it just doesn't happen, and that people publish using a single machine that they replace every couple years.

Consider the plethora of articles published for the last couple years of showing the very modest improvements in processor performance running existing software. Then consider the value of just a couple high profile cases of people showing 2x-4x gains on newer processors using algorithms that target them.

I think that value would be much higher than the cost of providing access, and that the absence of such articles is because the hassle and cost of testing on newer processors is still quite high. Consider the innovative project I just posted here: http://cglab.ca/~morin/misc/arraylayout-v2/ Great project, legitimate research, but no numbers for any Broadwell or Skylake processors. Or Power8 for that matter.

Some time back I was working at a company that made very popular cutting edge graphics software. Some of the key developers had beige-box machines labeled "Property of Intel" and "Confidential". Inside were Intel motherboards populated with pre-release Pentium III CPUs - also etched "Intel Confidential". These were Katmai machines which the engineers were using to implement SSE instructions[1] in the software.

So, yes, Intel does supply hardware to key developers. I have no idea what the criteria is, but next time, talk to your connections and see if your company or research group qualifies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_SIMD_Extensions

If the value really is there, that seems like a reason for Intel to have a program where they give hardware to researchers. I mean, they do this for reviewers who clearly generate value for the company, so why not CS researchers?

A comparative benchmark necessarily requires access to a range of processors, on a routine but rare basis. It really is inconvenient to buy and manage them all. For starters, where would I put them?

More software developers would take advantage of the special features in processors, if Intel provided easier access. I've been curious to try features and make comparisons, but it's just a couple steps too much hassle.

One way which could work out is to post on /r/gaming and request anyone who has a Skylake machine to run an Ubuntu liveusb (with openssh-server) and give you access for a couple of hours. In exchange you could buy them a Steam game.

/r/buildapc may be receptive to this as well.

or /r/pcmasterrace

Note Intel said Skylake server chips would introduce AVX-512 instructions, but Skylake consumer chips don't have those. That could mean the server chips will have a different vector unit with different performance.

That may not be a huge deal if the gather improvements are all you care about and they're present in both consumer and server chips. But worth knowing.

Thanks for the details. Yes, this is part of the reason I'm not interested in buying something currently, and instead am looking to do just some inexpensive testing.

Intel coincidentally officially launched the first Skylake Xeon's today: http://ark.intel.com/products/family/88210/Intel-Xeon-Proces...

Interestingly, despite being Skylake server chips, it looks like none of them support AVX-512. Do you happen to know which models actually will have support?

Or for that matter, what are all the differences between the "server" E3v5 Xeons and the "consumer" Skylake chips? Support for ECC RAM is the only one I see at a glance: http://ark.intel.com/products/family/88392/6th-Generation-In...

Haha, I saw that and asked the same thing at Anandtech.

These server chips are slight tweaks to consumer chips. They work with server chipsets [and ECC RAM as you caught!]; don't know what else differs. There aren't yet "large" Xeons (E5 or E7) on Broadwell or Skylake, only Haswell.

The table of Haswell chips from Wikipedia is the best handle I can quickly get on the how the server chip line works:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haswell_(microarchitecture)

- E5 and E7 have more cores and L3 cache

- They also support more sockets (the model numbers start 2, 4, or 8 according to how many sockets they support)

- They're released a lot later: the first Haswell chip was in June 2013, but all the E7s in the tables are listed as May 2015.

And Haswell is v3 so Broadwell is v4 and Skylake is v5.

If this roadmap is right, larger Broadwell chips will come next year and large Skylake Xeons might not be until 2017(!):

http://www.theplatform.net/2015/05/26/intel-lets-slip-broadw...

I was vaguely aware that architectures would mature before working their way up the server line, but not of how long that pipeline was. Anyway, guess we shouldn't hold our breath!

If you want to provide a USB-bootable image, I'd be happy to run whatever you'd like on my 6700k system.

Thanks for the offer. I'll see what else turns up. I'm looking both for an immediate solution as well as a longer term one, so would prefer to find something inexpensive that can be repeated easily for future tests.

Tweet Intel maybe? Stranger things have happened

Not by the hour but very inexpensive: https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver

Are those skylake?

I currently rent a Haswell server from Hetzner (and love them) but I'm not seeing anything more recent than that. Am I missing them somewhere?

Intel server chips are usually about a year behind desktop chips. Broadwell was delayed for desktop and will likely be delayed for server too. Most of the providers advanced enough to offer hourly pricing are running server (xeon) chips for their whole fleet, so expect a wait. Skylake Pentiums are supposed to be in the market now (but aren't), so that might be a lower cost option.

Isn't a heavily virtualized environment not going to give you actual performance or access to full cpu features?

Just buy a Supermicro Xeon v5 motherboard (when one becomes available!) and of course a Skylake Xeon E3 v5. $300 motherboard and $300 CPU. Minimal whole system should be about $1200.

Not affiliated with Supermicro, I just like their features and pricing.

The point of most cloud servers is to abstract away the kind of low level architectural details you are looking at here, so kind of opposing goals.. why not just build a little Skylake home desktop and try it there? It is not expensive, maybe $800 tops and you get a nice development rig in the process.

Why not just build a little Skylake home desktop and try it there?

Because I've already got a nice laptop, and several underutilized older servers. I'd like to test on Sandy Bridge, Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake, ARM, and Power8. The older Intel processors are easily available, https://www.runabove.com/ gives me access to Power8 (and supposedly ARM, although I haven't tried it yet), but I haven't yet found inexpensive ways to test on Broadwell and Skylake.

For this particular case, I was hoping to just spend a few hours testing some SIMD variants of this: http://cglab.ca/~morin/misc/arraylayout-v2/ The Haswell performance is disappointing, but I think that's because the Haswell AVX2 gather performance is poor but Skylake is supposedly much better. See the link I gave earlier for details.

I checked RunAbove with great curiosity, but the site seems to be indicating that the Power8 option is unavailable / "closed".

Does this mean all new projects are rejected, that they're trying to halt new applications, or what?

Also, are you the author of the 2nd link? I tried it, my `free' doesn't have `-h' (Slackware 14.1, procps 3.2.8, manpage says "Cohesive Systems / 20 Mar 1993").

I checked RunAbove with great curiosity, but the site seems to be indicating that the Power8 option is unavailable / "closed".

I'm not sure. I signed up during a Beta window last year, and don't know where they are going with it overall.

Also, I haven't used it in a few months, and when I tried right now I got errors on creating a new instance. I opened a support ticket.

Also, are you the author of the 2nd link? I tried it, my `free' doesn't have `-h'

No, I'm not the author. Searching though, it looks like "-h" is a synonym for "human readable" on some distributions, and just does automatic units.

I fear that RunAbove is no longer a viable way of testing on Power8. The response to my trouble ticket was so unhelpful that it did not even confirm whether they still expect a Power8 instance to start. Instead, they just referred me to the community support which consists of lots of unanswered questions with the same symptoms. I would suggest avoiding RunAbove altogether -- truly abysmal service.