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The course is excellent, and thank you for making it and offering it for free - but a word of caution for those considering following it: Along the way you will
by mbrookes 10y ago
The course is excellent, and thank you for making it and offering it for free - but a word of caution for those considering following it: Along the way you will incur not-insignificant costs for Amazon EC2 GPU instances, and, even if your instance is shut down, SSD EBS storage costs.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not suggesting it's not worth it, just highlighting that theres's more than a time commitment to budget for.
- mej10 10y agoLike how much? If you are going to get into deep learning for real seems like it might be worth building a multi-GPU workstation?
- jph00 10y agoOne forum user put together a <$700 complete PC with an adequate GPU. You definitely don't need >1 GPU. Or you can use spot instances, as a sibling comment mentions - about $0.20/hour generally.
- mej10 10y agoAh, cool. I am familiar with AWS and spot instances, but after that comment was assuming it required multiple instances for training or something.
- taneq 10y agoDon't buy equipment before you have demonstrated a real need for it. This applies across basically all of life, and it's so frustrating to see people ignoring it, because what ends up happening is they use a string of 'gonnas' to justify buying stuff they don't need. Gonna get fit - buy $1500 worth of gym gear. Gonna learn electronics - buy oscilloscope, power supplies, tons of components. Gonna get your motorcycle license - buy brand new bike and stick it in the garage. If you have a desktop computer, you're good to start. When you've done enough that your available CPU/GPU is limiting you on your own projects (not on something you pulled off github) then you can look at upgrading. /rant
- foldr 10y ago>Gonna learn electronics - buy oscilloscope A fairly accomplished electronic engineer told me that they'd never once solved a problem using an oscilloscope, but that it helped to keep them occupied while they were mulling over what might have gone wrong. (That's presumably why the better ones have so many knobs and dials to play with, like one of those children's toys.)
- taneq 10y agoI've certainly solved problems with a storage scope before, but not for a long time, and they were mostly software problems rather than hardware problems (ie. using it as a poor man's logic analyzer to infer what's going on with the code via a couple of spare IO pins). I really kinda want one though.
- hellofunk 10y agoThere is actually an accepted term for what you describe in many circles, called GAS -- Gear Acquisition Syndrome.
- j_s 10y agoBuild a fast deep learning machine for under $1K https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13605222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13605222 a month ago with many tweaks recommended in the comments. gcp: Contrary to the claims there, the CPU does matter dsacco: yes, this will work, it will quickly become suboptimal [...] as you scale your hobby into something resembling more professional work brudgers: I'd start with a used Dell Precision T7xxx series off of Ebay for a <$300 including RAM and a Xeon or two. croon: If the limit is a firm $1000, I would get something like this: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/XHV9Fd https://pcpartpicker.com/list/XHV9Fd
- nl 10y agoThere's been some work on using AWS spot instances for the course, which can save quite a bit: https://medium.com/slavv/learning-machine-learning-on-the-cheap-persistent-aws-spot-instances-668e7294b6d8 https://medium.com/slavv/learning-machine-learning-on-the-ch... http://wiki.fast.ai/index.php/AWS_Spot_instances http://wiki.fast.ai/index.php/AWS_Spot_instances
- jph00 10y agoTo give a more exact estimate - if you don't use spot instances ($0.20/hour) it'll cost $0.90/hour, and if you do the suggested 70 hours of work for the course, that's $63. And then there's around $6/month cost for the EBS volume.
- mbrookes 10y agoNot exactly. The time you spend on the course, and the time spent by your instance running workloads are two completely separate things. Your cost per-hour is accurate (plus a few bucks for an IP address), but the number of hours is off by an order of magnitude. Also, I'm paying double that per instance per month for SSD using the provided scripts to build the instances. It's the smallest part of the cost, but I mention it because it can take newcomers to EC2 by surprise if they have an instance shut-down but consuming disk space.
- snambi 10y agoBuy a laptop with a GPU. If you are serious about learning AI, it's worth spending few hundred dollars to get a proper workstation.
- leishulang 10y agoI heard that nowadays it's possible to buy a laptop and a external GPU?
- thewhitetulip 10y agoI have a mac, is it possible to really buy an external GPU??
- BrailleHunting 10y agoYes, but GPUs should only be consider for acceleration when there is insufficient local CPU power to accomplish something valuable. Otherwise, it's like buying a Ferrari to get groceries. https://www.journaldulapin.com/2014/12/04/a-nvidia-maxwell-card-with-thunderbolt-on-a-mac-running-yosemite/ https://www.journaldulapin.com/2014/12/04/a-nvidia-maxwell-c... https://tompaw.net/cuda-on-thunderbolt-egpu/ https://tompaw.net/cuda-on-thunderbolt-egpu/ http://xlr8yourmac.com/tips/MBP_ThunderBoltVideoCard.htm http://xlr8yourmac.com/tips/MBP_ThunderBoltVideoCard.htm AKiTio Node | Thunderbolt3 External PCIe Box for GPUs https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06WD8KS52 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06WD8KS52 Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 XTREME Gaming Premium Pack Video Card (GV-N1080XTREME-8GD Premium Pack) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HHC9Q3U https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HHC9Q3U
- metafunctor 10y agoYep, the course is free, but you'll need to pay for the computing power one way or another. If you have a workstation with a fairly recent Nvidia GPU (I used a GTX 980 TI) and bunch of spare disk space, you don't need AWS at all. You'll still pay for the electricity, of course, but it's not what I would call a significant extra cost. That is, if you already have the hardware.
- frik 10y agoWhat's the minimum nVidia GPU spec (VRAM) and SSD/HDD disc space (TB) required, from your perspective?
- dharma1 10y agoGet a GTX 1070 at a minimum. GTX 1080 Ti if you have a bit more cash to spend. Disk space is entirely dependent on your data set size. We're not talking huge numbers for most things you would be doing
- sai-prasanna 10y agoI have GTX 970 and how much spare space do we need? btw, I have a doubt, the course has specific video to setup aws, for local machines, what to do? should I install the required packages python, keras or whatever they use?
- metafunctor 10y agoThe install-gpu.sh script found in fastai's github can be used to set up the required environment on an Ubuntu box. A GTX 970 should do. The exercises are designed for GPUs with more memory, so you'll need to use smaller batch sizes here and there.
- snambi 10y agoBuy a pc/laptop with an NVIDIA GPU and setup Linux on it. It is a better option than using EC2 instances.
- frik 10y agoHow much VRAM is required?
- fsloth 10y ago"Along the way you will incur not-insignificant costs for Amazon EC2 GPU instances" Is there some particular constraint involved that I cannot run the computations at home?
- maaaats 10y agoHeat death of the universe.
- wayn3 10y agoI'd consider $60 bucks to pick up deep learning skills an "insignificant cost".
- muntoo 10y agoWell, that depends on how you define your cost function. :-)
- Hongkongcunt 10y agoHow much do you spend on rape?