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Build a fast deep learning machine for under $1K

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Re: Build a fast deep learning machine for under $1K

#31

Post by Coding_Cat »

IanCal wrote: post #12
ProxCoques wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 on that. There are a number of online build-to-order shops here in the UK which offer a truly vast range of component combinations. Better still, the order process automatically checks for compatibility with, for example, your choice of motherboard. Once you have the configuration you want, you just pay up and it arrives professionally assembled ready to rock. I don't think I'll ever by an off-the-shelf machine ag…

I found the premium on these was quite high, although even just buying all the components from a single place added a fair amount to my recent build. Compatibility, price checking and searching are all available with PcPartPicker (UK site: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/ ) which saved me an astonishing amount of time. The hour or two building the machine were worth the few hundred it saved me, but everyone has different…

I've found that the premium depends on the store and model. Some seem to do relative pricing, others absolute. In the latter case, if you want a big rig it's best to let someone build it for you.

Often times in those cases you also get great service because a) if you build PCs for a living you're a computer geek and it's fun to build an insane PC and b) they often use their biggest systems as advertisement. At least, that's what I've seen.

+cable management is like black magic to me. If I were to take the money saved as payment for me to get it as nice as those places get it, I'd be below minimum wage.

Re: Build a fast deep learning machine for under $1K

#32

Post by croon »

mamcx wrote: post #25
croon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not parent, but I've built my own computers for almost 20 years. As the articles author himself questions, he should have gotten the marginally more expensive CPU, and definitely the GPU with more RAM. * The overclockable CPU doesn't just mean that you very easily could get a 10%+ performance boost without much work, but also that you often (depending on your specific chip) can lower the voltage and make it run much…

Was years ago when I build my last PC and I'm out of the game. I'm tempted in build a hackintosh: https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/hackintosh-cutting-edge-k... - Intel i7 Kaby Lake - No decided on motherboard. The one that cause me less trouble (for hackintosh) is fine. - GTI 750ti (have) or buy a pascal nvidia. - NVMe drive if possible - 32 GB RAM. - Probably a Thermaltake CORE P3 case. Not decided. I was thinking…

> I was thinking in use a Liquid Cooler but wonder if the Noctua could be better/less noise?

Depends, is your option of water cooling an All-In-One-solution that have become popular in recent years? Their performance is on par or slightly better than a large heat sink + large low speed fan(s), but they're not generally quieter, as you still have fans for them, as well as a pump.

I considered those options when building mine too, and as I wans't too enthusiastic about assembling my own water cooling system, I went for a large air cooled heatsink instead (the D15). No risk of leakage or pump failure, and proven performance/low noise.

Re: Build a fast deep learning machine for under $1K

#33

Post by dsacco »

I think there should be a disclaimer here that while, yes, this will work, it will quickly become suboptimal (perhaps even dysfunctional) for a lot of work as you scale your hobby into something resembling more professional work. I personally would not start with a thousand dollar machine if you have any intention of doing serious computation in the future. While you can trade out parts pretty easy on a custom built machine, you don't want to be in a position where you have to trade out most of the core parts 6 months in.

For reference, I built a home PC that I successfully do deep learning and data analysis on (mostly tensorflow and scipy stack) for about ~$10k. It's liquid cooled, has 15 fans, four radiators, an i7-6900K CPU, 128GB RAM, four GTX 1080 GPUs (controversial), four TBs of HDD space and 1TB of SSD space. I don't recommend you start with this at all, but my point is that porting your hardware from point A to point B will be a pain if it comes to it.

I used the guide here as a reference about 8 months ago when I built it: http://graphific.github.io/posts/building-a-deep-learning-dr.... My purpose in doing this was, essentially, to pay for electricity rather than AWS/GCP/Azure compute resources (and in that regard it's been very successful!).

I know I'm hijacking a thread here to talk about building home machines for professional deep learning work when this story is clearly not intended for that, but I wanted to throw in this perspective so that it's understood this is very different from just "build this machine to start out and upgrade it later." There's a law of diminishing returns here, but in general my point is that I do not think this is a minimum for "start doing deep learning effectively at home." If you want to learn hands on deep learning cheaply, my opinion is that it would be more efficient to use compute resources from a cloud provider before diving into this with a home-based custom machine.

tl;dr: The demographic of folks who probably want/should/need to build a home deep learning machine probably has little overlap with the demographic of folks who want to do it non-professionally, or at least with only $1k in resources.

Re: Build a fast deep learning machine for under $1K

#34

Post by dbancajas »

dsacco wrote: post #33

I think there should be a disclaimer here that while, yes, this will work , it will quickly become suboptimal (perhaps even dysfunctional) for a lot of work as you scale your hobby into something resembling more professional work. I personally would not start with a thousand dollar machine if you have any intention of doing serious computation in the future. While you can trade out parts pretty easy on a custom built…

so do you earn money out of that 10K investment on machines? I didn't read the article but what's the benchmark on deep learning machines? Still TFLOPS?

Re: Build a fast deep learning machine for under $1K

#35

Post by [deleted] »

dsacco wrote: post #33

I think there should be a disclaimer here that while, yes, this will work , it will quickly become suboptimal (perhaps even dysfunctional) for a lot of work as you scale your hobby into something resembling more professional work. I personally would not start with a thousand dollar machine if you have any intention of doing serious computation in the future. While you can trade out parts pretty easy on a custom built…

[deleted]

Re: Build a fast deep learning machine for under $1K

#36

Post by karmicthreat »

dsacco wrote: post #33

I think there should be a disclaimer here that while, yes, this will work , it will quickly become suboptimal (perhaps even dysfunctional) for a lot of work as you scale your hobby into something resembling more professional work. I personally would not start with a thousand dollar machine if you have any intention of doing serious computation in the future. While you can trade out parts pretty easy on a custom built…

Serious question, why build a 10K$ machine like this rather than just spinning up some AWS instances? -edit- I know you mention wanting to pay for electricity rather than AWS. But that doesn't necessarily make financial sense.

Re: Build a fast deep learning machine for under $1K

#37

Post by j_s »

karmicthreat wrote: post #36
dsacco wrote: post #33

I think there should be a disclaimer here that while, yes, this will work , it will quickly become suboptimal (perhaps even dysfunctional) for a lot of work as you scale your hobby into something resembling more professional work. I personally would not start with a thousand dollar machine if you have any intention of doing serious computation in the future. While you can trade out parts pretty easy on a custom built…

Serious question, why build a 10K$ machine like this rather than just spinning up some AWS instances? -edit- I know you mention wanting to pay for electricity rather than AWS. But that doesn't necessarily make financial sense.

Many prioritize protecting their data, eliminating the possibility of using the cloud. This is usually a business use case though rather than personal.

Re: Build a fast deep learning machine for under $1K

#38

Post by j_s »

mrmondo wrote: post #6

My home server has an i7 4790K, 32GB DDR3 and... a GTX 1080 Gamer Edition that's doing... well, bugger all. Why is the graphics card in there you might ask? Well, it was sitting on my desk collecting dust as I wait patiently for a Pascal driver for eGPUs on macOS but Nvidia had delayed these for long enough that I thought I'd chuck it in my home server, it is being used by ffmpeg for x265/HVEC transcoding with Plex m…

Can you ballpark today's price tag for such a setup? There seem to be several pricing tiers floating around in this discussion and I'd appreciate the chance to see how your setup fits in without having to shop for it.

Re: Build a fast deep learning machine for under $1K

#39

Post by dragandj »

dsacco wrote: post #33

I think there should be a disclaimer here that while, yes, this will work , it will quickly become suboptimal (perhaps even dysfunctional) for a lot of work as you scale your hobby into something resembling more professional work. I personally would not start with a thousand dollar machine if you have any intention of doing serious computation in the future. While you can trade out parts pretty easy on a custom built…

On the other hand, by the time anyone starting just now learn enough ML to be dangerous, the price of the $10,000 hardware would drop to $5,000 or less, so starting with the cheapest yet decent option seems a better approach...

Re: Build a fast deep learning machine for under $1K

#40

Post by web007 »

dsacco wrote: post #33

I think there should be a disclaimer here that while, yes, this will work , it will quickly become suboptimal (perhaps even dysfunctional) for a lot of work as you scale your hobby into something resembling more professional work. I personally would not start with a thousand dollar machine if you have any intention of doing serious computation in the future. While you can trade out parts pretty easy on a custom built…

Are multi-GPU systems worth it until you have a TON of experience building parallel models? Almost all of the reference architectures I've seen are essentially serial, and TF doesn't have good data-parallelism built in to make use of N GPUs, N > 1.
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