The p3dn.24xlarge pairs 96 vCPU with 768 GiB of RAM, the 8.00 GiB-per-vCPU ratio that marks a GPU instance. In the name, "p" is accelerated computing, "3" is the generation, "dn" marks local NVMe storage and enhanced networking and "24xlarge" is the size within the p3dn family. It runs on Intel Xeon Platinum 8175 (Skylake) at 2.5 GHz, and AWS introduced it in December 2018. AWS has since shipped p4d and p5; p4d.24xlarge is the direct replacement at this size, scoring 1,593,361 CoreMark/s against this instance's 1,323,529 — roughly 20% more throughput for the same vCPU count. Rackspace Spot has no equivalent to offer: 8 × NVIDIA Tesla V100 wired together behind a high-speed interconnect is one tightly coupled machine, not 8 independent nodes — and that interconnect is usually what the instance was bought for. Spot's largest VM tops out at 16 vCPU and 128 GiB, and even that is not the missing piece here. The table below prices what AWS charges; the honest answer on the Spot side is that this workload stays where it is.
Match qualityNo equivalent
p3dn.24xlarge is 8 GPUs (256 GiB VRAM) wired together inside one chassis. The interconnect is what you bought — that is what makes it one accelerator with pooled memory rather than several machines — and Rackspace Spot has nothing that reproduces it. The Spot GPU class is built on the NVIDIA A30 (Ampere, 24 GB VRAM), and separate nodes of it on ordinary datacentre networking are not a substitute for a single interconnect-joined node.
Split the job across independent single-GPU nodes only if it is data-parallel with no per-step synchronisation and the model fits one card. Model-parallel work, or anything synchronising gradients every step, does not survive the move. Rackspace Spot sells x86_64 Kubernetes nodes up to 16 vCPU, plus one NVIDIA A30 GPU class.
Pricing by region
1 hr
Region
AWS on-demand
AWS Spot
1-yr Reserved
3-yr Reserved
Rackspace Spot
You save
US East, N. Virginia
$31.212
$3.237
$19.215
$10.416
US Central, Chicago
no AWS region
US Central, Dallas
no AWS region
Hong Kong
Sydney, Australia
London, UK
US West, San Jose
US Central, Dallas 2
no AWS region
US East, N. Virginia 2
$31.212
$3.237
$19.215
$10.416
When to use it
Good for
●Video transcoding and image processing
●Machine learning experimentation and fine-tuning
●Remote graphics workstations and rendering
●Workloads that fit inside 768 GiB of RAM
●Jobs that want 2 × 900 GB of local NVMe scratch space
●Network-heavy services — AWS rates this size at 100 Gigabit
Avoid if
●Starting a new deployment. p4d.24xlarge is the newer generation at this size.
●The working set needs more than 768 GiB of RAM
●The work is single-threaded. Most of these 96 vCPU would sit idle.
●Anything the CPU can do fast enough. GPU hours are the most expensive on the price list.
●More than 8.00 GiB of RAM per vCPU is needed — that ratio is fixed for the whole family
Rackspace Spot sells spare capacity at market prices. You pay what the market decides, not a list price.
Spot sells spare capacity at market prices. It is the cheapest compute on the internet.
Prices are set by supply and demand. You pay what the market decides.
Compute is delivered as fully managed Kubernetes. All infrastructure is taken care of.
Egress costs $0.01/GB after the free allowance. AWS charges $0.09/GB.
