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Benchmarking TensorFlow on Cloud CPUs: Cheaper Deep Learning Than Cloud GPUs

minimaxir.com

1–10 of 108 posts

Re: Benchmarking TensorFlow on Cloud CPUs: Cheaper Deep Learning Than Cloud GPUs

#2
Shoutout for Hetzner's 99 euro/month server with a GTX 1080, much better than the pseudo-K80s that Google Cloud provides for $520/month. The Google K80s are half or quarter the speed of a real K80, part of the reason they show so badly in the comparison.

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex51-ssd-gpu?co...

Re: Benchmarking TensorFlow on Cloud CPUs: Cheaper Deep Learning Than Cloud GPUs

#6
While the authors article is relevant if you are stuck on GCP, on AWS you will not have the same conclusion. This is because AWS has GPU spot instances (P2) which can be found for ~80% cheaper depending your region [1]. Hopefully one day soon GCP will support preemptible GPU instances.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/pricing/

Re: Benchmarking TensorFlow on Cloud CPUs: Cheaper Deep Learning Than Cloud GPUs

#7

Neat article. I think it's worth pointing out that this guy is an active commenter in the Hackathon Hackers facebook group, if you want to see more of his content. He can be pretty pretentious sometimes, but good content nonetheless.

You don't need to make a throwaway to call me pretentious. :P

Re: Benchmarking TensorFlow on Cloud CPUs: Cheaper Deep Learning Than Cloud GPUs

#9
I would love to see these results put up against Google's new TPUs[1]. While TPUs are still in Alpha, my guess is that customized hardware that understands TensorFlow's APIs would be a lot more cost effective.

[1] - https://cloud.google.com/tpu/

Re: Benchmarking TensorFlow on Cloud CPUs: Cheaper Deep Learning Than Cloud GPUs

#10

No spot instances?

I kept it the analysis to GCE only for simiplicity. (both because the costs of spot instances are highly variable, and costs are not prorated on Amazon meaning you have to pay for the full hour; an additional concern if you just want to run a small ad-hoc training)
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