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Colab Pro

colab.research.google.com

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Re: Colab Pro

#81

Post by dannyw »

dr_kiszonka wrote: post #58
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It would be economically meaningful to ML students.

The free version of Colab is pretty great for ML students.

Re: Colab Pro

#82

Post by dannyw »

hobofan wrote: post #69

I hate to be the boy who cries "Google will cancel this service", but this offering just seems strange. With a very low price point coupled with not that huge of a user base, this will end up making how much for Google? $1MM/month? $10MM/month? Either would be negligible for them.

Colab Pro is probably the "we want to give verified non-bots more access, but need a small monetary cost to actually stop abuse".

The collection of a credit card isn't just monetary: it also provides some sort of anti-abuse as most people have a limited number of credit cards; and even a bulk credit farm operation has a monetary cost per card (I read the going rate for a hacked card even is $100 ish).

Aged Google Accounts go for $1-2 from account farmers these days.

Re: Colab Pro

#83

Post by dannyw »

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.

While this is pretty frustrating and seemed to be the result of a bug, I would personally only use preemptible instances are when I have everything scripted, and save the state of my work when you get a termination signal.

To me, they're not really sold as "cheaper, just not 100% guaranteed"; they're sold as "cheap, it will be killed at any moments notice so".

Re: Colab Pro

#84

Post by dannyw »

dwiel wrote: post #60
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.

I killed a lot of time with this exact issue a couple months ago as well. Quite frustrating, and it was even worse trying to include the preemptible GPUs in a kubernetes cluster. It would often take so long to add the GPU to the cluster that it would get killed before it even ran any real workload. This cycle would repeat for an hour before a machine stayed up long enough to actually schedule kubernetes pods on them.

It would be nice of GCP didn't bill for pre-emptible instances that got system killed within 10 minutes of starting; or something reasonable like that.

I doubt it makes a material difference to their (or our) bottom line, but it's just a nice gesture and makes you never feel like "damn, I literally wasted money".

Re: Colab Pro

#85

Post by agluszak »

I wonder how long it takes until Google shuts down the free service. It's so easy to abuse it. And what Google gets in return?

Re: Colab Pro

#86

Post by panchicore3 »

agluszak wrote: post #85

I wonder how long it takes until Google shuts down the free service. It's so easy to abuse it. And what Google gets in return?

For example learning about the type of abuse and how to sort out issues while free, so product future version can be sold as tested?

Re: Colab Pro

#88

Post by wildermuthn »

A lot of comments are missing the value here: cheap and easy TPU access for hobbyist use of deep learning models that need TPUs for fine-tuning and/or inference (GPT-2, I’m looking at you).

Re: Colab Pro

#89

Post by eru »

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #7
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.

To clarify, does that mean you can continuously train a model for e.g. hundred of hours or are you still limited by the 24 hours notebook limit?

You can work around that by saving your model and reloading.

Re: Colab Pro

#90

Post by eru »

mistrial9 wrote: post #37
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...

A big Mercedes, but share three people to a bedroom.
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