What FREE cloud computing services exist?

[drkirkby]

I wonder if anyone has gone looking for totally free computing services? I looked at a couple.

1) Alibaba. I'm not 100% sure, but I think they offer a free service. However, after starting the registration process, I gave up with that, as Alibaba demand too much personal information. Alibaba want a copy of ones passport, photograph of oneself and so on. I was personally not willing to divulge all this to Alibaba.

2) Amazon AWS
https://aws.amazon.com/free offers a free trial for one year. Which I'm using to test if 2^110826841 -1 is prime or not.
https://www.mersenne.org/report_expo...0826841&full=1
Amazon want a credit card, but only take a $1/€1, then refund it. I'm in the UK, and see they have taken £0.72, which is about $1/€1. I expect Amazon will refund it, but I might gain/lose a tiny bit if the currency rate changes. (I recently lost over £60 from PayPal after receiving a refund on a faulty item from eBay that I purchased for €1400. PayPal used to compensate for that, but now they don't). I copied some information from
https://www.mersenne.org/cpus/
for the Amazon CPU below, so you can get some idea what I got. It's an Intel E5-2676 v3 @ 2.40GHz. You can get some idea of the performance of that CPU from
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php....40GHz&id=2643

Last Activity   2021-04-04 08:32, Last Updated 2021-04-04 08:32, Registered 2021-04-03 21:05
GUID    <stop secret, or maybe it does not need to be>
Software Version        Linux64,Prime95,v30.3,build 6
Model   Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2676 v3 @ 2.40GHz
Features        Single core, Prefetch,SSE,SSE2,SSE4,AVX,AVX2,FMA,
Speed   2.399 GHz (4.893 GHz P4 effective equivalent)
L1/L2 Cache     32 / 256 KB
Computer Memory 987 MB   configured usage 307 MB day / 307 MB night

What (if any) other services offer free computing?


Dave

[a1call]

I believe Google and Oracle also both offer free trials of one month. The free trials are pretty much worthless though, since they generally have a low cap on number of cores that can be utilized. Corrections are welcome. AWS was the only service that kept charging me even when all the instances were inactive. I remember I had to jump through a lot of loops to get them to stop.

[drkirkby]

The exponent I am doing a PRP test on would be a world record. It is expected to take 83 days to complete on the one core that I have in the Amazon cloud. I would be able to complete 4.4 of them in a year. I assume probably a bit below 4, as the later ones I get assigned would be larger. That’s obviously not going to challenge Ben Delo for Mersenne numbers tested, but it is not a totally useless amount, especially given that it is free.

The issue of Amazon charging the credit card is one of significance. I have thought of getting a “Basic” bank account in the UK, where there’s no overdraft whatsoever. People in debt are encouraged to use them, as you can not get further into debt. Having one of those and sticking £5 in it for trials or other things where a company wants to verify a card, but be able to take much is quite an attractive idea.

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by drkirkby

I wonder if anyone has gone looking for totally free computing services? I looked at a couple.

... What (if any) other services offer free computing?

Use the reference info. I've updated the list about halfway down the long page at https://mersenneforum.org/showthread...922#post521922

Look for heading "Cloud computing specific reference threads or links" followed by an alphabetical order bullet-point list of over a dozen choices.

[drkirkby]

The prime test on the free Amazon account is really rocketing along, at and incredible speed
https://www.mersenne.org/report_expo...0832257&full=1

Allocated on 4th April 2021.

P-1 test completed 18-days later on 22nd April
Now a massive 4.2% of the PRP test completed!

My GIMPS assignments page shows an estimated completion of 102 days, but mprime indicates it will complete in 547 days. How can they differ so much?

[Work thread May 15 20:45] Iteration: 4690000 / 110832257 [4.23%], ms/iter: 445.810, ETA: 547d 16:15

I guess it's a case of "you get what you pay for".

Dave

[slandrum]

Don't trust any ETA on the server. It can be off by orders of magnitude.

Time estimates for a new machine are often wildly inaccurate, and settle down after about the third assignment.

The reports from mprime are much better estimates - those can vary a lot too, but not to the extremes you'll see on the server. Of course the mprime estimates assume that the current conditions are going to continue through the end of the test, and that the machine will be running 100% of the time.

[drkirkby]

Originally Posted by slandrum

Don't trust any ETA on the server. It can be off by orders of magnitude.

Yes, I know.

Originally Posted by slandrum

Time estimates for a new machine are often wildly inaccurate, and settle down after about the third assignment.

The reports from mprime are much better estimates - those can vary a lot too, but not to the extremes you'll see on the server. Of course the mprime estimates assume that the current conditions are going to continue through the end of the test, and that the machine will be running 100% of the time.

At the minute on one computer I have mprime showing

[Worker #1 May 25 12:45] Iteration: 44100000 / 103728907 [42.51%], ms/iter:  1.482, ETA: 24:33:06
[Worker #2 May 25 12:47] Iteration: 85600000 / 104082689 [82.24%], ms/iter:  1.460, ETA: 07:29:42
[Worker #1 May 25 12:48] Iteration: 44200000 / 103728907 [42.61%], ms/iter:  1.480, ETA: 24:28:32
[Worker #2 May 25 12:49] Iteration: 85700000 / 104082689 [82.33%], ms/iter:  1.461, ETA: 07:27:38
[Worker #1 May 25 12:50] Iteration: 44300000 / 103728907 [42.70%], ms/iter:  1.484, ETA: 24:30:14

so the PRP test of the exponent 104082689 should finish in 7 hours, and the PRP test on exponent 103728907 in 1 day. The webpage at https://www.mersenne.org/workload/ estimates one will be finished in 1 day, and the other 4 days. The next exponent to perform a PRP test on, (104075269) is estimated to take 7 days, but it should actually finish in two days.

On the computer on Amazon, mprime currently shows as

[Work thread May 25 08:50] Iteration: 6640000 / 110832257 [5.99%], ms/iter: 414.703, ETA: 500d 02:27
[Work thread May 25 10:02] Iteration: 6650000 / 110832257 [6.00%], ms/iter: 429.827, ETA: 518d 06:58
[Work thread May 25 11:12] Iteration: 6660000 / 110832257 [6.00%], ms/iter: 414.441, ETA: 499d 16:34

but the GIMPS website is showing this as finishing in 107 days. Given this job started 51 days ago on 2021-04-04, and is only 6% complete, I would have thought it blindingly obvious that it will never finish in 107 days. I don't understand how the website gets this estimate of 107 days. Admittedly its the first exponent I have tested on this slooow computer, but surely the feedback from mprime of it taking around 500 days to complete should be understood by the GIMPS website. Running 24/7 for 56 days, should give enough information to make a better estimate that 107 days.

[Xyzzy]

https://www.servethehome.com/oracle-...s-always-free/

[drkirkby]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

https://www.servethehome.com/oracle-...s-always-free/

That's interesting.

I do have some free Amazon credits I will use, but I should check out the link you gave.

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

https://www.servethehome.com/oracle-...s-always-free/

As someone with basically zero linux experience, I would love a step by step guide (for both the account and data set-up) to setting up mprime on that so I could run P-1's on it.

[LaurV]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

setting up mprime

You may eventually try mlucas... those cores are arm-based, I don't believe you do much with mprime...
The name is confusing, as some may imagine is the mighty Nvidia GPU. It is not.

We are talking here about Beagle-bone reloaded or something, but yet, far away from a good intel/amd CPU. Maybe if you get your hands on a physical toy, and play all 128 cores or so, but sharing only 4 of them with other guyz and galz won't get you very far. But nonetheless, interesting to follow to see how it will develop in the future...