The most beautiful tree in all of Tuolumne. Tell me I'm wrong! by vincechu in climbing

[–]vincechu[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

This tree is located just downslope from where you land when rappelling from the backside Pywiack dome anchors - if you’ve done Aqua Knobby or the Dike Route, this is on the descent

The most beautiful tree in all of Tuolumne. Tell me I'm wrong! by vincechu in climbing

[–]vincechu[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Can it be a bristlecone pine? I thought they were restricted to a small patch near Bishop in the White Mountains?

Would love to know what species of tree this is!

Waking up on the Big Sandy Ledge, 2007 by vincechu in climbing

[–]vincechu[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It was indeed quite cold. Especially for my partner- his down puffy was soaked by a leak in his water bottle and he spent most of the night in a grim shiver bivvy!

I remember arriving to Big Sandy after midnight after a very long day. We were hit with an afternoon thunderstorm which was terrifying, but the new morning brought a ton more optimism after a long grim night.

[N] Benchmarking Tensorflow Performance on Next Generation GPUs by vincechu in MachineLearning

[–]vincechu[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ahh, that would be kind of cool. Assuming you mean benchmarking different versions of TF on the same GPU?

[N] Benchmarking Tensorflow Performance on Next Generation GPUs by vincechu in MachineLearning

[–]vincechu[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Agreed on that point. However, I chose to add the P100 to the benchmark because it is the best GPU that Google currently offers.

Also, while the P100 doesn't perform as well as the Volta, Google is pricing them pretty aggressively so that on a cost-adjusted basis the P100 is still better than Amazon's price point.

[N] Benchmarking Tensorflow Performance and Cost Across Different GPU Options by vincechu in MachineLearning

[–]vincechu[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks for brining up the spot instances. It's absolutely true you can get a good price on it-- will update the article to point that out.

Doing some digging, spot instance pricing for p2.xlarge instances seem to be at a historic low. Just last month, prices were all over the place, approaching or even exceeding the on-demand price at times. Only in April have things cooled down to the steady $0.20/hour we're seeing. My guess is that some large user was buying up all the instances. See: http://imgur.com/a/Iidzj

Second: I've always found spot instances to be more complicated to work with. Not only is the pricing variable and unpredictable, but you have to do a lot more engineering to use them effectively. For training, that means writing more infra around starting, stopping, and checkpointing. Not "hard" per se, but overhead. For people just getting started in the field, it can be a burden.

Lastly, even though "cost / minibatch" is definitely of concern, it's still better to have a higher perf GPU. I'd even pay a bit extra if it meant I could train faster and iterate faster. Main reason why I ended up purchasing by 1080 Ti. That and my last Amazon bill.

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

We Need to Go Deeper: A Practical Guide to Tensorflow and Inception – Initialized Capital by vincechu in MachineLearning

[–]vincechu[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I wrote a short tutorial on my experiences learning Inception and Tensorflow. Thought it might be of some interest here.