6 ms·
Deep learning box for $1700
- jacquesm 9y agoIf the OP reads this, this fragment makes no sense: > Even thought the GPU is the MVP in deep learning Also: if you ever do another build: do not take the parts out of their protective packaging until you need them. A nice little bolt of static from your fingertips to the motherboard, memory sticks or GPU terminals could ruin the part. Those bags and the foam are conductive and help to disperse static energy so better to use them until the last moment.
- quadrature 9y agoMVP as in Most Valuable Player.
- jacquesm 9y agoMost people would read that abbreviation as 'Minimum Viable Product' in the HN context.
- monkmartinez 9y agoNot me, I totally understood what he meant due to the context. The reality is that "Minimum Viable Product" was hijacked from the MVP of sports.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 9y agoI'm not into sports (unless I'm doing something myself :) ), so I never heard it used like that before.
- esrauch 9y agoIts a pretty common Americanism that is disconnected from sports in my experience, I suspect the average American would recognize it as "something/someone that is contributing a lot", and only a tiny percentage would even recognize "minimum viable product" spelled out.
- smcl 9y agoOr outside the US - "MVP" seems to come from US sports terminology which are still relatively niche in the rest of the world (compared to Football anyway, and I reckon there's a large amount of people who don't even care about sports)
- beanpainter 9y agoHeh, there's a painting company that parks their van along Kezar Drive in SF with the name/logo "MVP", which they intend to be read as Most Valuable Painter. It always makes me think of the scene in an old episode of Mr Bean where he paints a room by putting a firecracker in a paint can.
- slavivanov 9y agoThanks for the tip! You're the real MVP, @jacquesm ;)
- nacc 9y agoI have thought about the same thing when playing with deep learning at home, until I put electricity bills into the equation. A beast like what the author has built, with full power, will cost $0.1/hour in electricity bill alone at where I live ... which almost equal to the cost of a p2.xlarge spot instance on Amazon. So if someone else is paying for the electricity, build your own gig, otherwise, Amazon is pretty hard to beat.
- nathancahill 9y agoSame goes for Bitcoin mining.
- hueving 9y agoThe spot pricing is pretty crappy to compare to since you only get to use spare capacity. If you have any project where availability matters then you should compare to the on demand price of $0.9/hour. If availability doesn't matter, it means you wouldn't run the box full time anyway, in which case your power calculation is too high.
- marcosdumay 9y agoIt's a processing task. You run it for a fixed CPU time. Wall time may or may not matter depending on the application. You almost never take availability into account, but taking spot prices will increase wall time.
- elil17 9y agoExcept his build is 4x faster: https://medium.com/initialized-capital/benchmarking-tensorflow-performance-and-cost-across-different-gpu-options-69bd85fe5d58 https://medium.com/initialized-capital/benchmarking-tensorfl...
- lowglow 9y agoThis is 100% the process I've gone through to build a DL box. Anaconda saved me in he fast.course.ai lessons.
- monkmartinez 9y agoHow did you like those courses?
- lowglow 9y agoIt's OK but definitely think we need a bigger picture / organically growing course material.
- jph00 9y agoJust to clarify - the actual url is course.fast.ai :)
- lowglow 9y agohaha, sorry pre-coffee! :)
- joshu 9y agoWrong CPU. Only 16 PCI lanes.
- polskibus 9y agoWould you mind to elaborate?
- joshu 9y agoIt's not enough bandwidth for multiple GPUs.
- barrkel 9y agoPCIe lane width isn't normally a significant bottleneck for GPU performance, for games at least. Going from 16x to 8x loses you 1% or so, depending on the hardware. I don't know the bus traffic profile of software being run for deep learning, but it may not be noticeable. I'd also pick a CPU with more lanes though.
- joshu 9y agoIt's fine for a single GPU. For multiple GPUs in a deep learning box you want more.
- Toast_ 9y agoWhat cpu would you recommend? Would it be better to go with a 2x cpu mobo?
- en4bz 9y agoDefinitely not since only 1 socket is usually directly attached to the PCIe bus. The best CPU for the money at the moment is most likely an i7 5830K with 40 PCIe lanes. Or you could wait (probably the best idea) for AMD to release it's "threadripper" CPUs tomorrow with 44 lanes and for Intel to release it's new i7/i9 lineup in 2 weeks, also with 44 lanes.
- jph00 9y agoFYI the OP also created a really nice way to create persistent spot instances on AWS - see approach 2 here: http://wiki.fast.ai/index.php/AWS_Spot_instances http://wiki.fast.ai/index.php/AWS_Spot_instances
- rahimnathwani 9y agoI went for a slightly cheaper option ($950), with a slower GPU, less disk, but more RAM and better PSU and case: - Used Dell T7500 (Xeon X5675, 48GB RAM): US$350 including delivery from ebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-T7500-Home-PC-Xeon-6-Core-3-06GHz-X5675-48GB-RAM-/172642310795 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-T7500-Home-PC-Xeon-6-Core-3-06G... - Nvidia GTX1080 8GB (US$480) - SSD ($100) - USB 3.0 PCIE card ($20)
- Matthias247 9y agoIf the boxed fans have not improved significantly in the last years then a good heatsink/fan would have been a very good investment. At least if one sits in the same room where the box is running.
- throwaway32421 9y agoConsidering the ridiculous amounts of time spent on training, how do those of you deal with 'work' ? Work remotely ? Run multiple experiments at the same time ? I'm having an increasingly difficult time explaining to my client why it's taking so much longer to debug the code as opposed to getting the implementation off the ground.
- adsfk32 9y agoYou can get a 12-core Xeon (evaluation sample) v3 for ~$200.