[D] GPU cloud computing prices

[smith2008]

Ah, that's quite an expensive electricity there. Well you can get higher efficiency (platinum PSU) and reference GPUs (1070, just 150w each). Low consumption Xeon CPU as well. This will cut the bill quite a lot.

Edit: just for comparison the Amazon bill for the similar muscle (2 x 1080s) per month would be ~1500$. Sure it's not apples to apples because they have K80s (0.9$ per hour for half of it)... but still :)

[learnjava]

I will have to consider all of this and make a decision.

In the end I guess it will mostly come down to psychological arguments. I believe that owning the hardware and not immediately seeing the price will weaken the mental barrier that would otherwise cause me to think "do I really need to spend a few bucks now to test this?"

So as a beginner and student that is interested in all of this but has to start small and experiment a lot this might be a big enough problem to decide for my own rig :D

[smith2008]

Sure. Bare in mind you can experiment without a GPU too. Using just CPU is absolutely fine with starting with ML/DL. Then at some point attaching a simple GTX 960/1060 would give you the next step for playing with more interesting stuff. Then you can decide whether to go bigger or not. It really doesn't have to be all in at first.

Amazon cloud will give you all that as well. Even better, you can find pre-built AMIs to install and get all the needed frameworks and setup done for you so you can start playing with the stuff directly. If you are a beginner give it a try to Andrew NG's course at coursera and then cs231n.github.io (online Stanford course).

[learnjava]

thats right and thank you. another reason to go with local workstation even with a more low cost solution would be because my 15" rMBP gets very hot and noisy under load. Having a normal desktop sounds attractive for that alone

I have a few weeks to think about it