I have to do some heavy computation; so I need 4 A100 GPUs. Is this possible? How much will it cost me?
Yes GPUs are available. Let’s take Azure as an example and use a browser search bar. Search on ‘azure 4 a100 gpus’ and scroll down past the “Ad” hits to discover ND A100 v4-series - Azure Virtual Machines
When I follow this link I get a page of content and a left-side menu that includes links to other
related pages. This is good because on this page the VM with A100 GPUs attached shows up
in the table as having eight GPUs which is more than I want. I click on the link for
NC A100 v4 and this has a corresponding table that lists the Standard_NC96ads_A100_v4
as having 4 A100 GPUs so this looks like what I want.
This list of VMs that support GPUs is helpful for shopping around for the right kind of capacity. Other GPUs are features: V100s, T4s and so on. However what is not provided is cost. For that we can go to the Azure pricing calculator and choose the VM we identified above. I infer the cost of this VM with 4 A100 cards is just under $20/hour. The 100-hour compute task I have in mind will cost about $2000; really closer to $2500 after I add in some storage and some disk space and so on. The cost is listed as ‘monthly’ but in the concept I have this is a one-time calculation for a specific project. I can stop all the resources and put data in archival storage to drastically cut monthly spend to a few dollars.
For the cost calculator result to persist: Log in to Azure and click < save > at the bottom of the page. This gives a shareable persistent URL like this.