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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday May 11 2019, @09:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the TANSTAAFL dept.

Fellow AI Nerds, Beware: Google Cloud Glitch Leaves Nvidia T4 GPUs off Estimated Bills for Some Virtual Machines:

If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. There appears to be a bug in the Google Cloud Platform online user interface that may lead engineers into thinking they're renting GPU-accelerated virtual machines for free, when, really, they're not.

Anyone hoodwinked by the glitch will realize the Compute Engine resource is not gratis, and actually costing potentially several hundreds of dollars a month, the next time they look at their cloud bill. It's not going to bankrupt anyone, but it is something that you may trip up over, so consider this a heads up. You may even encounter a similar gremlin in future, or on another cloud platform. It can happen.

We found out about the bug from Soufian Salim, an AI engineer at French software startup Bee4win, who wanted to train a neural network model using Nvidia's spanking new Tesla T4 GPUs. He had spun up a virtual machine instance from the Google Cloud marketplace – specifically, the AI Platform Deep Learning VM Image – and configured it to use a bunch of T4s to speed up calculations.

[...] Google does offer free T4s on its Colaboratory platform. Here, developers can run specific AI models in Jupyter notebooks using Google's cloud resources at no charge at all. Salim said his model wasn't using the Colab service, however, and neither was our model. We're also aware that you can use T4s for free via certain non-AI promotions, such as within a BlazingSQL Colaboratory environment. These aren't production environments, though, and are for testing purposes, hence the freebie GPUs.

[...] Salim's inkling that it was simply a user interface bug, and that he would eventually be billed by a backend system for the T4 GPUs, was later confirmed when he discovered that Bee4win was indeed charged for the rented graphics processors despite it not appearing on the estimated costs. "As I suspected, we were billed for the GPU, at about 0.9$/hour. It was an UI error," he told The Register on Thursday.

The problem hasn't been fixed, so be warned. A Google spokesperson told us on Friday: "We are aware that some customers are not seeing estimated charges for T4 GPUs on the marketplace web interface before creating virtual machines, and we are working to fix the pricing estimator."

Maybe Google needs an AI to figure out the pricing?


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by darkfeline on Saturday May 11 2019, @10:39PM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Saturday May 11 2019, @10:39PM (#842502) Homepage

    Uh, this is actually an estimate though. Google Cloud has exact prices listed in the pricing documentation. The estimator, if I understand correctly, basically calculates based on your current/expected usage how much your total would be at the end of the month.

    e.g., if compute costs 1 USD per vCPU per hour, and your current/predicted workload will use 10 vCPU hours per day, then the UI estimate will be 300 USD for the month. But if your workload spikes in the middle of the month and uses 100 extra vCPU hours, then you're still going to get billed at the listed price for a total of 400 USD for the month.

    The UI is a convenience; there are exact documented prices. This isn't like US health care where you get billed arbitrarily for services you didn't even receive.

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