
Show HN: TensorFlow for AWS on a Real GPU - alexkern
https://github.com/pavlovml/tensorflow/blob/master/README.md
======
Smerity
Honestly, there are enough issues with TensorFlow right now due to CUDA 3.0
that using it with AWS is highly problematic. I appreciate the author's
attempt, but there's no way the five lines of code he changed to allow CUDA
3.0 has fixed any of the issues found in [1], such as NaNs during training,
equally slow training on a g2.2xlarge as a g2.8xlarge, etc ...

If you're just interested in playing around, then your laptop will do fine -
TensorFlow is happy with just about any hardware you throw at it. Hell, your
modern Android phone will run it =]

If you're interested in a more involved experiment, develop and debug your
task locally on your laptop. By the time you're ready for large scale
training, there might be a stable and battle tested AMI such that people are
no longer reporting issues in [1] about it.

Again, if you're interested, follow the CUDA 3.0 issue on GitHub[1] - this is
nowhere near a solved problem and will only cause headaches if you're using it
for education.

[1]:
[https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/25](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/25)

~~~
alexkern
Thanks for the feedback! I've added a note to the README that support is still
experimental. I'll be tracking the issue and updating the repo + AMI as it
develops. Will be compiling with the latest commit (72a5a60) for configurable
CUDA Compute support soon.

~~~
vrv
Thanks, would be good to have multiple sources of verification that HEAD now
supports this natively without issues like unexpected NaNs.

[https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/25#issuecomm...](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/25#issuecomment-156256071)
is one verification :)

~~~
alexkern
Updated to the latest commit, works for me! :)

------
tacos
Top link points to a non-existent AMI so this "recipe" \-- like almost every
"here's how to ..." recipe on GitHub that gets posted on HN -- doesn't work. I
swear, it's like 100% fail on these types of posts.

Also this "real GPU" is explicitly called out in the Google docs as
unsupported.

~~~
droque
I tried with the Oregon region and it failed. I changed to the N. California
region and it worked. (No comment about the GPU though.)

~~~
tacos
Github recipes are the "works on my machine!" of the new millennium. Just like
pecking in programs from computer magazines in the 1980s, only better!

I like the ones that are hardcoded to a specific name in a home directory
best. Especially when it doesn't match the github name of the "creator."

