[HN Gopher] Colab Pro
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Colab Pro
Author : rahidz
Score : 42 points
Date : 2020-02-08 09:42 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (colab.research.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (colab.research.google.com)
| zapf wrote:
| There's so much data in this universe, people don't know what to
| do with it. When people don't know what to do, an industry grows
| to let them "feel" they are doing something useful.
| fibrennan wrote:
| 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 a really standard
| workflow for ML/DL. It's great for toy projects eg training MNIST
| but not for training more interesting models that are popular in
| the research/professional communities today.
|
| - Notebooks are fully persistent. With Colab, you need to re-
| install everything every time you start your Notebook.
|
| - Colab instances can be shutdown (preempted) in the middle of a
| session leading to potential loss of work. Gradient will
| guarantee the entire session.
|
| - Gradient offers the ability to add more storage and higher-end
| dedicated GPUs from the same environment. If you want to train a
| more sophisticated model that requires say a day or two of
| training and maybe a 1TB dataset, that's all possible. You could
| even use the 1-click deploy option to make your model available
| as an API endpoint. The free GPU tier is just an entrypoint into
| a full production-ready ML pipeline. With Colab, you would need
| to take your model somewhere else to accomplish these more
| advanced tasks.
|
| - A large repository of ML templates that include all the major
| frameworks eg the obvious TensorFlow and PyTorch but also MXNet,
| Chainer, CNTK, etc. Gradient also includes a public datasets
| repository with a growing list of common datasets freely
| available to use in your projects.
|
| Those are the main pieces but happy to elaborate on any of this
| or other questions!
|
| [0] https://gradient.paperspace.com
| bhl wrote:
| I wonder who made the decision to spin this out into a commercial
| product; maybe it has to do with Google's push into the cloud
| further? I always thought Colab was just an experimental tool;
| it's still under the research.google domain.
| jonbaer wrote:
| I wish they would connect Colab under https://script.google.com
| so you can run a notebook at interval times, something akin to
| what https://github.com/TensorTom/colabctl does.
| ccarpenterg wrote:
| 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 for this basic cloud computing
| service.
| bhl wrote:
| Curious to how you've been training with Colab. I tried running
| 50 epochs on a UNet3D model, each taking about 20 minutes to
| run; it was a pain in the ass because the session kept
| disconnecting.
| ludwigschubert wrote:
| 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
| clusters on demand, with really simple Python integrations say
| using dask, or ray.
| ianhowson wrote:
| $10/mo doesn't pay for much compute in Google Cloud. Colab Pro
| is offering GPUs and high memory instances, presumably under
| the assumption that interactive users will be mostly idle.
| minimaxir wrote:
| The Deep Learning VM (available as a native option when
| creating a new GCE VM) has a bunch of DL tools, and starts a
| JupyterLab instance on launch: https://cloud.google.com/deep-
| learning-vm
|
| There is an easy native command for port forwarding to Jupyter:
| https://cloud.google.com/ai-platform/deep-learning-vm/docs/j...
| leoh wrote:
| Because they're trying to introduce a different paradigm for
| computing. Notebooks are portable, purpose-oriented, and allow
| Google to make decisions about the underlying implementation
| allowing for a $10 monthly price point and an incredible level
| of performance not unlike what they've done for BigQuery.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Perhaps this is more profitable. I've heard that Colab has
| become very popular for people doing certain kinds of deep
| learning, but that the wait for GPU instances has been
| frustrating. It seems a paid tier to get priority is directly
| targeting those users.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| I've recently used Colab to run some pretty cool StyleGAN
| notebooks. Finally I can replicate so many cool projects
| without bending my head how to setup gcp, virtualbox or
| install tensorflow into geforce macbook.
|
| Doubt I'll pickup deep learning as a profession by this, but
| it's a step forward.
| sebasmurphy wrote:
| You could alternatively use the google AI Platform Notebooks
| which are basically the same thing and billed per hour. You can
| now Prebake a docker images with all of the libraries that you
| need.
| minimaxir wrote:
| 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.
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| 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?
| anidh wrote:
| The page said "Longer running notebooks and fewer idle
| timeouts mean you disconnect less often." I'm guessing there
| is a limit but it has been increased for the pro customers.
| In contrast on GCE you can train for 22 hours if you want.
| freediver wrote:
| Good idea, but it's the first premium product that I've seen
| where the pitch is 'you _may_ get certain features if you
| subscribe '. In another words there is no guarantee and a premium
| subscriber may still end up with same GPU as a free user. You may
| end up with a high-end V100 (not available to free) might be a
| better pitch.
| Confiks wrote:
| 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] "Why aren't resources guaranteed in Colab Pro?" on
| https://colab.research.google.com/signup
| londons_explore wrote:
| 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".
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I am tempted to sign up. Colab is very usable on Safari for
| iOS/iPad.
|
| I invested 18 months ago in a GPU setup for home. Really
| convenient but I somewhat regret the purchase. I used to spin up
| GCP GPU instanced when needed and that was not convenient. Colab
| is very convenient.
|
| $10/month for better GPUs and longer sessions seems like a good
| deal.
| fulafel wrote:
| This seems to be a hosted Jupyter service, right mybinder, is
| that right?
| LegitShady wrote:
| Google Colab is a hosted jupyter notebooks service and is free.
| It includes the use of a Tesla k80. Runtimes reset after 12
| hours
|
| This is the pro/paid offering with fewer limitations and better
| resources.
| iddan wrote:
| 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.
| bitxbit wrote:
| We should really thank Mathematica for the notebook format.
| anidh wrote:
| Did mathematica invent the notebook format? Just curious..
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Looks like a yes according to this page at least:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notebook_interface
| [deleted]
| williamstein wrote:
| 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
| Mathematica, mainly because Fernando Perez (who was a
| physicist) had used Mathematica a lot and wanted something
| similar but (much) better. In 2005 there was a project to
| make an IPython notebook interface as an OS X graphical
| application, which got demoed at Sage Day 1 (in Feb 2006).
| That motivated me to get interested in doing something
| similar, but using Javascript and HTML instead. I hired Alex
| Clemesha, who just finished his physics undergrad and was a
| _heavy_ Mathematica user to work on Sage fulltime. He did a
| lot of work with me during 2006 to create a web-based
| notebook interface (and also to provide a mathematica-like
| graphics compatibility layer for Python, which is in Sage).
| The Sage notebook felt pretty similar in 2007 to what Jupyter
| notebook feels like, and it definitely inspired the UI. We
| developed Sage notebook heavily and then all sort of lost
| interest and moved on to other things (e.g., Jason Grout, who
| was involved a lot with the Sage notebook went to work at
| Bloomberg, where he did a massive amount of work on
| JupyterLab). Fortunately, Fernando Perez and others got
| incredible grant support and many fantastic engineers
| together built the Jupyter notebook. Jupyter notebook
| provided the same sort of cell /output UI as we had with the
| Sage notebook, but was much more general purpose (many
| kernels) and used more "modern" implementation techniques, by
| 2011 standards at least.
|
| There's a lot of amazing things about the Mathematica
| notebook that we never even tried to implement. For example,
| Mathematica has a much more sophisticated nested structure.
| Also, by default Mathematica shares one kernel across
| multiple notebooks (or at least it did last time I tried it).
|
| Just to finish the story, in 2013 I started CoCalc to make a
| fully realtime collaborative notebook interface. Around the
| same time, many other people started another project called
| JupyterLab that reimplemented a Jupyter notebook client using
| much more powerful modern approaches. In addition, there's a
| lot more going on regarding notebook clients these days,
| including Nteract, Kaggle kernels, and http://deepnote.com/.
| Some people like me who work on these surely played around a
| lot with Mathematica notebooks when they were kids :-).
| dankle wrote:
| > For now, Colab Pro is only available in the US.
| bitxbit wrote:
| This is so much better than buying your own hardwares.
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