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Colab Pro

colab.research.google.com

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Re: Colab Pro

#31

Post by londons_explore »

Confiks wrote: post #16
freediver wrote: post #5

Good idea, but it's the first premium product that I've seen where the pitch is 'you may get certain features if you subscribe'. In another words there is no guarantee and a premium subscriber may still end up with same GPU as a free user. You may end up with a high-end V100 (not available to free) might be a better pitch.

A fair use policy, which you seem to be referring to [1], is pretty standard fare for many 'invididual user' products to exclude heavy-use groups. However, they could at least define expected and minimum capacity. They might omit it because the business in this – aside from capturing users in their ecosystem – is arbitraging wholesale GPU price against consumer monthly needs, along with scaling the free tier. [1] "Wh…

I would be happy with an explanation of "none of our service is guaranteed, but if we don't manage to give you your chosen GPU more than 80 percent of the time, you are free to cancel, and we will refund your final months subscription payment".

Re: Colab Pro

#32

Post by londons_explore »

ianhowson wrote: post #21
ludwigschubert wrote: post #20

Can anyone see a reason why they wouldn’t just allow you to provision (and pay for) a persistent Google Cloud VM instead? (I currently do that manually and need port forwarding to a machine that runs Jupyter.) It’s hard for me to understand why Colab would build such a vague pro tier instead of the simplest possible solution: let me pay for my compute. There’s so much more potential, too; they could offer whole clust…

$10/mo doesn't pay for much compute in Google Cloud. Colab Pro is offering GPUs and high memory instances, presumably under the assumption that interactive users will be mostly idle.

Under the assumption that many users on one GPU eventually end up needing more compute and migrating along the easiest cost path to GCE and TPU's, which they earn lots from.

Re: Colab Pro

#33

Post by sillysaurusx »

minimaxir wrote: post #4

A preemptible P100 + VM on Google Compute Engine is about ~$0.45/hr, so to exceed that value with Colaboratory Pro (ignoring conveience factors) you'd need to train for more than 22 hours in a month. Which, for deep learning, is not too unreasonable. Reading between the lines of both the signup page and up-to-date FAQ, it seems like the free TPU in Colab notebooks will be depreciated, which isn't too surprising.

Has anyone here actually tried to use preemptible GPUs on GCE? You're lucky if you can get the VM to stay up for more than 10 minutes.

Litany of failure here: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1174480402779648000

Perhaps I just got unlucky and the situation is improved now. But it was a waste of a day for me.

Re: Colab Pro

#34

Post by minimaxir »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #33
minimaxir wrote: post #4

A preemptible P100 + VM on Google Compute Engine is about ~$0.45/hr, so to exceed that value with Colaboratory Pro (ignoring conveience factors) you'd need to train for more than 22 hours in a month. Which, for deep learning, is not too unreasonable. Reading between the lines of both the signup page and up-to-date FAQ, it seems like the free TPU in Colab notebooks will be depreciated, which isn't too surprising.

Has anyone here actually tried to use preemptible GPUs on GCE? You're lucky if you can get the VM to stay up for more than 10 minutes. Litany of failure here: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1174480402779648000 Perhaps I just got unlucky and the situation is improved now. But it was a waste of a day for me.

I haven't in awhile; when I used them more heavily, I got the full 24 hours. It's possible that it's region-dependent; IIRC I had better luck with us-east1 than us-central1.

I should test more at some point.

Re: Colab Pro

#35

Post by mistrial9 »

anidh wrote: post #12
bitxbit wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should really thank Mathematica for the notebook format.

Did mathematica invent the notebook format? Just curious..

Mathematica certainly pushed the Notebook format as a fundamental feature, with WYSIWIG math that no one else had ..."Invented" is pretty hard to say honestly, but the popularization and technical polish, absolutely yes

Re: Colab Pro

#36

Post by boulos »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #33
minimaxir wrote: post #4

A preemptible P100 + VM on Google Compute Engine is about ~$0.45/hr, so to exceed that value with Colaboratory Pro (ignoring conveience factors) you'd need to train for more than 22 hours in a month. Which, for deep learning, is not too unreasonable. Reading between the lines of both the signup page and up-to-date FAQ, it seems like the free TPU in Colab notebooks will be depreciated, which isn't too surprising.

Has anyone here actually tried to use preemptible GPUs on GCE? You're lucky if you can get the VM to stay up for more than 10 minutes. Litany of failure here: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1174480402779648000 Perhaps I just got unlucky and the situation is improved now. But it was a waste of a day for me.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Sorry about that. We (I) had screwed up and allowed users to smash themselves into the wall of "Huh, you keep getting preempted, but there's technically a slot right here". We've re-enabled some backpressure to keep you from getting hit over and over again, and instead see a stockout error when you should probably try another (less full) zone.

Re: Colab Pro

#37

Post by mistrial9 »

ccarpenterg wrote: post #19

I've been using Colab for over a year now. I train deep learning models on NLP and medical imaging datasets. It's a great tool and it lets you focus on the code and the models, instead of the hardware and OS. But $9.99/month is a little expensive for my taste. You can't customize it and if they change something you have to install software by hand sometimes. It should be $1.99/month, that's the kind of price I'd pay…

in medical research you are saying $10 / month is too much.. this might be a study in consumer psychology! Here in California, biotech secretaries drive a mercedes...

Re: Colab Pro

#38

Post by vicmiclovich »

ccarpenterg wrote: post #19

I've been using Colab for over a year now. I train deep learning models on NLP and medical imaging datasets. It's a great tool and it lets you focus on the code and the models, instead of the hardware and OS. But $9.99/month is a little expensive for my taste. You can't customize it and if they change something you have to install software by hand sometimes. It should be $1.99/month, that's the kind of price I'd pay…

do you do this training for work or personal gain? (Usually if it is a company, they would be perfectly fine expensifying this as a business cost)

Re: Colab Pro

#39

Post by [deleted] »

ccarpenterg wrote: post #19

I've been using Colab for over a year now. I train deep learning models on NLP and medical imaging datasets. It's a great tool and it lets you focus on the code and the models, instead of the hardware and OS. But $9.99/month is a little expensive for my taste. You can't customize it and if they change something you have to install software by hand sometimes. It should be $1.99/month, that's the kind of price I'd pay…

[deleted]

Re: Colab Pro

#40

Post by sillysaurusx »

boulos wrote: post #36
sillysaurusx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone here actually tried to use preemptible GPUs on GCE? You're lucky if you can get the VM to stay up for more than 10 minutes. Litany of failure here: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1174480402779648000 Perhaps I just got unlucky and the situation is improved now. But it was a waste of a day for me.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. Sorry about that. We (I) had screwed up and allowed users to smash themselves into the wall of "Huh, you keep getting preempted, but there's technically a slot right here". We've re-enabled some backpressure to keep you from getting hit over and over again, and instead see a stockout error when you should probably try another (less full) zone.

Hey, neat! Thanks for your work. I was hoping that this was the case, and I haven't tried since September. But I'll give it another shot now.
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