Discovering how much cheaper spot EC2 instances were than normal on-demand instances gave me the courage to try out a faster GPU. I had been using K80s which are painfully slow, but very cheap. The spot price for the V100 is about the same as the on-demand price of the K80s, so using those with spot instances won't be any cheaper, but it won't be more expensive either.

I didn't think the V100s were such great GPUs, so I wasn't expecting it to be worth the extra cost. How wrong I was. Training the network I am currently playing with on a K80 with a batch size of 48 took about 8-12 hours per epoch. Training it on a V100 with a batch size of 64 is looking like it's going to take about 2 hours. With the V100s priced at about 4x the K80s, that works out to about the same price per compute to a little bit cheaper, depending on exactly how long it took per epoch on the K80.

When you factor in the value of not having to wait an entire day to see the results of an epoch, this is a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, I'm sure my AWS bill is going to increase substantially. That's how they get you... Once you have a taste of HPC they know you'll be back for more...

Etiketten: machine_learning, ec2, aws, gpu