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Comment by Radim | Hacker News Reader

Hi guys, sorry for the unresponsive site. I had to add crap to the end of the URL so I could resubmit here. But now without caching, the HN traffic is melting our server :( EDIT: fixed.

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Answering the comments here:

GPUs: makes no sense for word2vec (and many other ML algos).

Azure: no support from Microsoft for our program. The Docker image and all code is 100% public though, so please run yourself & report the results. We'll be happy to update.

AWS spot: might still try that.

Thanks for the feedback!

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Hi Radim, I understand that it is hard to stay on top of things in this fast-evolving market, but you omitted a few important things.

1. "Softlayer is also the only platform that allows the provisioning of bare metal[...]": so does AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/11/announcin...

2. "Softlayer and AWS charge in hourly increments." AWS offers per-second billing: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-per-second-billing-for-...

3. Echoing @tedivm's comment, for a real comparison you'd really have to include GPUs. Do you plan to write a follow-up? (Disclaimer: I work for AWS)

Hi Julian, happy to get feedback!

1. AWS launched this last week, after the benchmarks were finished & published -- can't take the blame for that :) Exciting news though.

2. Launched during the benchmarks -- sorry we missed this!

3. I disagree that CPUs are "not real", but, yes, we already ran some GPUs benchmarks (alluded to in this blog post, too). Stay tuned.

Not blaming you at all, Radim - it's not easy to stay on top of the latest developments in this fast-moving space. This was great work and I hope you will continue running these benchmark test. Also, feel free to ping me via sameting@amazon.com if you need any help with anything AWS.

It may not make sense for the model you choose, but realistically speaking if you want a real comparison of machine learning platforms you need to do so on GPUs. The major competitive advantage that AWS has over GCE is the Volta GPUs, which are significantly faster than what any other provider is offering.

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