
Shareable Jupyter Notebooks That Run on Free Cloud GPUs - hsikka
https://blog.paperspace.com/paperspace-launches-gradient-community-notebooks/
======
hsikka
Hey HN, really thrilled to see this launch. I was a Research Fellow at the
Paperspace Advanced Technologies Group this summer and saw this project
develop. Gradient Notebooks were an indispensable tool in the work I was
doing, and had several advantages for my work over other notebook services. As
a researcher, it’s great to see an emphasis being placed on starting projects
with no fuss or issues around setting up infrastructure and sharing/forking
models.

Giving anyone access to free GPUs and powerful tooling seems like an
incredible opportunity. I'd love to hear what you all think!

~~~
solidasparagus
Sharing free GPUs is amazing! GPU costs are such a huge blocker for people
learning deep learning.

But as a cloud provider, I would be worried about abuse by cryptojackers. I
hope that's not a problem and this is sustainable.

~~~
fierarul
I don't understand this obsession with cloud-based deep learning for
beginners. It creates this hyper-focus on cost: always remember to shut down
your instances! With the occasional slippage which causes psychological (and /
or financial) pain... The mood is all wrong for somebody entering a new
(work-)field.

Google Colab is decent and free.

But you can do computing on cheaper hardware too. The CPU is good enough for
learning and a GPU is not outside the budget of many people that presumably
already own laptops and such.

I know a local group that shares an i9 / dual GTX "server" and are learning on
this shared hardware. I think it's great!

I had a small budget for this learning curiosity and bought a Ryzen and a GTX
with only 4GB of RAM. Got a job offer after a while which I had to turn down
as it seemed to actually kill my interest in the field. Doing some small
personal project now without much fuss to rekindle the fire. And using the CPU
for it since it's so small.

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sabalaba
Hey HN, just wanted to post here to say that if you need more than 6 hours
training (free tier limit) we offer a 4x GPU machine that is only $1.5/hour.
Just wanted to let everybody know what kind of competition is out there while
you're doing your price comparisons:

[https://lambdalabs.com/service/gpu-cloud](https://lambdalabs.com/service/gpu-
cloud)

~~~
JonathanFly
I'd be interested in whatever you could offer that's lowest specs in every
respect except GPU ram. So 1 GPU, moderate to low everything else, but 24GB of
RAM. Right now there's no great way to run those cheaply, even if I want to do
something that might only take a few hours.

~~~
foobarbecue
Does a card like that exist? Last time I shopped for them (a few years ago) it
didn't.

~~~
dkobran
It does and we offer it. It's called the P6000 and it includes 24GB GPU RAM.
It's one of the most popular chips we offer for any kind of CV task as you can
fit a ton of images, video frames etc. in GPU memory. In any case, here's a
link to the full lineup we offer:
[https://gradient.paperspace.com/instances](https://gradient.paperspace.com/instances)

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jfim
I tried browsing the documentation for several minutes, but it does not answer
this question: which Jupyter kernels are supported? Is it only Python like
Google colab?

~~~
DTE
Because everything is running in a docker container behind the scenes we
support any kernel you would like. We have a handful of pre-built containers
and you can also add a custom container very easily or build one off of a base
template such as the Jupyter R stack. Here is a list of some of the container
we provide by default
[https://docs.paperspace.com/gradient/notebooks/notebook-
cont...](https://docs.paperspace.com/gradient/notebooks/notebook-containers)

~~~
jaredscheib
I've gone ahead and added this response to the docs here:
[https://docs.paperspace.com/gradient/notebooks/about#contain...](https://docs.paperspace.com/gradient/notebooks/about#containers)
:)

~~~
jfim
Awesome, thanks a lot!

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doctorpangloss
Google Collaboratory works pretty well as an alternative to this. In fact it
works so well, like there’s so little time spent in IT, my total usage of it
is quite low, because so much of what I’ve been communicating or seen
communicated with notebooks is low quality in the first place.

~~~
llampx
> so much of what I’ve been communicating or seen communicated with notebooks
> is low quality in the first place.

Do you think there's a format which is better suited to sharing data stories?

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zerop
Question: Why use this over Google colab?

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solidasparagus
Can someone clarify how this works in terms of data? I see "5GB of persistent
data", but that's nowhere near enough for my training data. Is there also a
larger amount of non-persistent storage that I can download data to?

~~~
DTE
The 5GB of persistent data is available for by default for all free accounts
running on the free instances. You can easily upgrade your storage up to 1TB
by upgrading you subscription within the console. We can also provide up to
4TB by opening a ticket.

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Traster
Sorry, I'm very new to this, how do notebooks/shared notebooks play with
version control?

~~~
psv1
Badly - under the hood jupyter notebooks are json which stores not only the
code but all of the metadata as well. I know that there are tools that help
with integrating jupyter and git but I just end up going back and forth
between .py files in VSCode and notebooks in jupyter lab depending on what I'm
working on.

~~~
jimmyvalmer
Aye, notebooks truly represent a wrong turn in scientific computing. The
absence of version control alone is a showstopper, but it's insane generally
to launch long-running estimations interactively via browser-based notebook
interfaces, with outputs that are not readily greppable. But corporate
philistines continue to ooh and ah over jupyter's visuals, and companies like
Gradient are more than happy to cater to their FOMO.

~~~
enriquto
> Aye, notebooks truly represent a wrong turn in scientific computing.

I agree with that problem, yet somehow like the idea of notebooks. Maybe the
real tragedy here is that jupyter notebooks are saved as json and not as a
valid program with comments, that can be run "as is" from the command line.

~~~
jimmyvalmer
> I agree with that problem, yet somehow like the idea of notebooks.

You like the tight feedback loop of REPLs, as do I. You don't need the clunky
machinery of jupyter to effect REPLs with emacs and ipython.

> real tragedy here is that jupyter notebooks are not [saved] as a > valid
> program with comments

Here's a simple way of doing that: write your code as valid programs with
comments.

~~~
enriquto
> write your code as valid programs with comments.

That's what I do! Then I have a script that converts my python program to
shitty json that my colleague--who can only conceive to work inside a notebook
--can run it. Finally, another script translates back the json to a readable
code; and more importantly, to something that can meaningfully be put into
git.

I would love if the jupyter interface allowed to save the notebook directly
into a program with comments. Then all this silly sorcery would not be
necessary.

~~~
jimmyvalmer
It does, nbconvert.

But that's besides the point. The jupyter ecosystem, like other widespread and
unwieldy formats such as Microsoft Word and PDF, poses a brutal obstruction to
Unix workflows.

~~~
enriquto
> It does, nbconvert

Yes, my script simply calls the nbconvert library, with some trickery to
ensure that the result is idempotent. But I would like not to need this
script, that instead the jupyter interface worked with valid python files
directly (maybe after enabling some option).

> poses a brutal obstruction to Unix workflows.

It's not as much the notebook itself, but the file format chosen by default by
the notebook. If it was a human-editable textfile there would be no problem,
and there is no practical obstruction for that (other that young programmers
today cannot conceive a different "serialization" format than json).

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snrji
Does anyone now if this system supports Google Docs-like live editing? I'm
struggling to find such a service.

~~~
lrem
Google Colab?

Disclaimer: I use Colab regularly as part of my job in Google.

~~~
mjn
I don't believe Colab is real-time live in the way that Google Docs is. I'm
using it to teach a class and would love that kind of functionality, but
unless I'm missing some option, when I make changes to the notebook, students
who have it open don't see the changes immediately, only when they reload.

~~~
lrem
I haven't tried coding live, but comment threads do seem real-time. Probably
wrong assumption on my part, sorry.

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tastroder
fyi: your chatbot makes a "popping" noise when scrolling down and puts "(2)
New Messages" in the tab title. Both distract from your content.

