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Powerful Machine Learning Resources: What Google Colab Is and How to Use It
Google Colaboratory (Colab for short) is a free cloud-based service that lets you do machine learning (ML) work in a notebook environment. It's based on Jupyter notebooks, which we'll discuss more later. Colab has several advantages over other services:
- It's free!
- You don't need to install anything on your computer.
- You can use GPUs (graphics processing units) for heavy computing tasks.
- It integrates with Google Drive, so you can keep all of your work in one place.
To start using Colab, you must first create a Google account (if you already have one, then great!). After logging in to your account on colab.research.google.com , click the "Sign-in" button and authorize Colab with access to your email and files:
You can use Colab for a variety of tasks, including:
- Training models on images
- Training models on text
- Training models on sound
- Developing machine learning applications
- Running TensorFlow programs
One of the best things about Colab is that you can use GPUs (graphics processing units) for heavy computing tasks.
- You can run TensorFlow programs in google Colab.
- Google Colab runs on Linux instances, which support GPUs (graphics processing units).
- Colaboratory supports both CUDA and OpenCL to accelerate the computation with GPU devices installed inside our servers. However, note that not all operations are accelerated.
- GPUs are powerful, but they are not magic. If your model does not make efficient use of GPU acceleration, then Colab will run no faster than a non-GPU version on your local machine.
- The default hardware configuration for each project is one K80 GPU and 0.75 GB of memory per virtual CPU (vCPU).
- You can adjust the number of vCPUs in your project to be more or less powerful.
- Having multiple GPUs boosts performance for some models, but others are bottlenecked by data transfer between GPU memory and CPU memory. To know if you should increase the allocation, check how much time is spent reading vs writing during training.
Google Colab is a powerful machine learning environment that offers several advantages over other services. In this blog post we have told you everything you need to know about how google colab works and how to get started with it. We hope you find it useful!
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