So forgive my kind of sporadic posting, I’ve been trying to keep to at least a biweekly schedule since I am living with a newborn. The whole new baby thing makes writing posts for this blog really tough. So since it is super late and I need to get some sleep soon, I wanted to talk up a google product that I recently came across.
So what is google colab?
Colab is basically google drive for jupyter notebooks. What is awesome about that is that you have a fully fledged python environment for data science anywhere that you are. Since it is a cloud solution, you have python anywhere that you want it.
That’s pretty awesome.
It comes with 12 hours of continuous GPU use!
Did google just give me a GPU for Deep Learning
Yes! Yes they did!
It turns out that google wants you to use tensorflow, and google cloud services. So as a way to entice you away from AWS for your cloud computing needs. To do that, they are giving you access to a Tesla K80 GPU! When I heard this I couldn’t believe that they gave that away for free. So I tried it out and ran a horse race on my work station and using colab.
My Horse Race, Not Such a Spoiler The GPU Won
So the GPU kicked my work station’s butt. By the time my work station trained 1.5 epochs with a head start, the GPU was done. That wasn’t unexpected. What was unexpected was that it really was a GPU that I could use whenever I wanted to use it for deep learning for free, basically forever.
I thought that google was giving me a virtual environment. But no, they actually gave me a real GPU. That is so amazing. It makes me wonder what I could build with access to such amazing hardware at no cost to myself! Anyway, I just thought that I would share the good news about this great product.
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