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Colab Pro

colab.research.google.com

41–50 of 108 posts

Re: Colab Pro

#41
post #12
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should really thank Mathematica for the notebook format.

Did mathematica invent the notebook format? Just curious..

Yes, my understanding is that Theodore Gray invented the "computational notebook" for Mathematica in the 90s. Here is the best writeup of the history of the notebook that I've ever read. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-scie...

Re: Colab Pro

#42

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…

I mean when modern GPUs are $1000 I'm curious how you think $9.99 is too much.

Re: Colab Pro

#43

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…

They do, and that service is called Platform AI Notebooks: https://cloud.google.com/ai-platform-notebooks

Re: Colab Pro

#44
Not sure who this is geared towards. People mostly use Colab to share GPU-dependent work from what I can tell. How would that work on a paid subscription? Do others need to pay to run the notebooks you shared? Can they use their "free" account?

As far as utility for research, as a researcher, I _already have_ several local GPUs at my disposal, and I only use notebooks to kick the tires on things and visualize. The moment something starts to look like it's useful, I move it to a real *.py file where it's more maintainable and diffable.

Edit: actually I now think I know who this is geared towards. It's geared towards people who aren't going to really use it, and don't mind to pay $120/yr (+tax) for something they don't use. Which, IMO, is pretty smart.

Re: Colab Pro

#45

Just wanted to share a Colab alternative I work on called Gradient[0] (also includes a free GPU). Some of the key differences: - Faster storage. Colab uses Google Drive which is convenient to use but very slow. For example, training datasets often contain a large amount of small files (eg 50k images in the sample TensorFlow and PyTorch datasets). Colab will start to crawl when it tries to ingest these files which is…

After spending 5 minutes on the site, I could not figure out what an offering comparable to Colab Pro would cost me (i.e. single instance of a notebook hooked up to P100), and bailed. In contrast, Google puts pricing front and center, which makes me feel better about their value prop in spite of the fine print around limits and preemptibility.

Re: Colab Pro

#46

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…

I mean when modern GPUs are $1000 I'm curious how you think $9.99 is too much.

Not to disagree, but P100 is not a "modern" GPU. It's based on Pascal, so it's a couple of generations behind. Throughput-wise it's roughly equivalent to 1080ti. Which is still something like $600, so your point stands.

Re: Colab Pro

#47
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Feel free to send me an email (contact info in profile), if you want to go back and forth.

Re: Colab Pro

#48

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…

Yes, this is how I did this when I had easy access to GCP credit. Have a GPU VM with one of the ready to go images that launched jupyter on boot (or in a tmux session). Then just port forward 8888 over ssh. Worked very well and I found it far more easy to work with than colab.

This is not cheap though. A V100 runs you over $1.5k a month if you don't turn it off.

Re: Colab Pro

#49
post #8
post #6

Colab is the best notebook I've ever used. It is a real game-changer and I can totally understand why people who use daily would pay for it.

We should really thank Mathematica for the notebook format.

It was in the middle of using Jupiter for something that Steve Jobs’s “bicycle for the mind” quote started to really make sense for me.
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