How does AWS charge for Elastic Inference accelerator?

Greendrake

2/22/24, 8:26 PM

I am trying to understand how AWS charges for Elastic Inference accelerators. The relevant page says:

you pay only for the accelerator hours you use

But I can see two possible readings of that:

The hours that an EC2 instance with an EI accelerator attached to it runs.
The hours that the EC2 instance actually accesses/engages the EI accelerator.

The difference can be significant: the EC2 instance can do some other stuff apart from running EI, and only engage it from time to time (even though it remains attached/accessible all the time).

The linked page gives two examples where the prices for EC2 and EI are simply combined, which suggests that option #1 above probably applies. But, it could simply mean that in those particular examples the EC2 instances run the attached EI accelerators non-stop all the time i.e. there is no time when the instance runs but the accelerator is idling.

Can someone please clarify how the charges work?

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amazon-web-services

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Tim

2/22/24, 9:29 PM

You're right, the page is imprecise. Based on what other services do, I expect that you pay for the time the accelerator is attached to your EC2 instance, as you have reserved that hardware for your exclusive use.

+ 2

Greendrake

2/22/24, 10:01 PM

I'm not too sure about "reserved hardware for exclusive use". EI is a network-attached device which, presumably, leverages a shared pool of GPUs, so, when it is not used (albeit attached), the GPUs in the pool should be available for other EI accelerators.

Tim

2/22/24, 10:04 PM

Yeah. You really need to ask AWS this question. Billing support is free.

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