51–60 of 108 posts
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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.
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.
My biggest concern with google product is, it might be shut down any time when any small and medium company begins to depend on it. This is the legacy of google in which anything which cannot generate revenues like it's advertising business it's shut down. So although my team use from time to time google colab, we keep an alternative always open.
Hopefully with this 9.99/month charge it might become viable business but will not be as significant as the google's primary business of advertising, so there will always be sword at the neck of this product.
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We should really thank Mathematica for the notebook format.
Mathematica's notebook definitely strongly inspired Colab's notebook. Colab is an implementation of the Jupyter notebook format and UI. Jupyter, which launched around 2011, itself was strongly inspired by (1) the IPython console from around 2003, and (2) the Sage Notebook which I launched around 2006. I can tell you definitively that Sage Notebook is very Mathematica inspired. The IPython console looked a lot like Ma…
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When you're using your own money to pay for cloud resources, that unbounded worst case is pretty scary.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I have been a user of colab and recommended to many friends. As mentioned in the other thread the session time of colab notebook is too low, so increasing it for pro is good, but still if one has a large data for testing and training, dependency on google drive or products becomes one another bottleneck, but not that bad. My biggest concern with google product is, it might be shut down any time when any small and med…
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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".
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We should really thank Mathematica for the notebook format.
Did mathematica invent the notebook format? Just curious..
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
Since the subscription is monthly with no commitment, I think the viewpoint is probably something like "if it's not meeting your needs then unsubscribe." A refund of $10 is not going to be economically meaningful to folks who want to subscribe to this service. "Chosen GPU more than 80% of the time" sounds nice but it opens you up to adverse selection. They aren't looking for customers who want to pay ten bucks a mont…
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.
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.