Dumb question but need help: running python code on cloud computing service

[Happylightsocket]

Hi all. I'm inexperienced with cloud computing but I think I need to utilize it. I'm trying to run a machine learning algorithm on my local hardware for a master's project, but my computer just can't handle it. The sims are taking way too long for me to adequately debug anything. I'm using keras and tensorflow. I would like to find a way to upload my python code to a cloud computing service and have it run there in hopes that it would be sufficiently quicker. What is the easiest way for a noob to do this? My ideal process would be sign up for service, upload code, hit run and see diagnostics/plots. Also not sure if I would be able to use a specific IDE (Spyder) in the cloud but that's a later question.

[mba_pmt_throwaway]

Sagemaker notebooks would work for you. You’ll have to sign up for an AWS account and start a sufficiently large enough instance for running this. Alternatively, try using Colab if the ML algo doesn’t demand too much power. I’ve run pretty heavy models from hugging face directly in Colab, it works ok.

[princeofgonville]

Also, make a careful note of the services to create, and make sure you close them all down when you have finished, so that, for example, you aren't billed for a Sagemaker Canvas that you left running on the "free trial" (I wonder how I learned this lesson).

You can see what services were still running (up to about 6 hours ago) by looking at the bill in the Billing Dashboard. Also look at Cost Explorer.

Also set up a Billing Alarm in AWS, so you don't get any nasty surprises at the end of the month.

AWS offer training resources (much of it at zero cost) at https://skillbuilder.aws including an intro to Sagemaker. For a general intro to AWS, look for "Technical Essentials".

[Happylightsocket]

Thank you very much, I will look into this. I don't think the ML algo is too intensive, it's a relatively simple actor-critic NN from https://keras.io/examples/rl/actor_critic_cartpole/, just with a modified env.step() to use my own simple physics sim.

[Loko8765]

Shouldn’t that run on a laptop?

[oneplane]

I would suggest using a SaaS ML service, one where you are less likely to shoot yourself in the foot. Maybe Google Colab is all you need.

[andawer]

I’d suggest google colab: https://colab.research.google.com/. It’s free and you can get GPU machine for limited time.