222 karma · joined February 19, 2021
This was a project for me to learn the full stack (non coder before) and been a really exciting journey. 6 months ago I thought it would take me 2 months to build and launch:D
Added to feature requests!
Regarding environments, it's funny, when I was starting out I would kill for a pre-configured instance because I wanted to focus on modeling and didn't care if package X was version x.x.y or x.x.z. But as you grow as an ML engineer and develop your own toolkit these things start to matter.
So when creating a machine on gpu.land you have the choice of going pre-configured or just having a clean Ubuntu image. The former is meant for newcommers while the latter for pros. That was my thingking!
1) There's a finite capacity in the high 10s of GPUs. Currently the service is utilized at <10% capacity, so there's a lot of room to grow before we run out. If that was to happen (or even if we get to 50%), I could go and request more and (hopefully) expand the capacity quickly.
2)When building gpu.land I specifically wanted to make it safe for users to upload / store sensitive data. Of course the service is more geared towards hobbyists / researchers, just because that's an easier market to reach for a solo dev - but there is nothing at the technical level that sacrifices data privacy. For example, data on instances is encrypted both at rest and in transit within the DC + you and only you have SSH keys to your instance and nobody else can access it. Check out our security & privacy section in our FAQ - https://gpu.land/faq
I will add to FAQ, thanks for pointing out.
So the way I would describe your progression as a student (at least from my experience):
- Traditional ML -> probably can run on your laptop
- Simple DL -> colab is great. Cheapest there is.
- SOTA DL -> you're probably looking at training times well into 10s of hours / days, so you'll need something that can last longer than 12h of colab time. Plus at this point you're probably sophisticated enough that you want to setup your instance once and start/stop it rather than going through setup with colab every time. That's where https://gpu.land/ fits it.
So tl;dr; - absolutely use colab first (it's cheapest), but when you outgrow it, consider gpu.land.
See the "Are instances within my account connected?" item in the FAQ - https://gpu.land/faq
If you're going to need 64 GPUs I'll have to increase your account limit (currently 16 GPUs per account). Email me at hi@gpu.land
If you have a say 200GB harddrive you're only paying $4/month for storage.
So we actually explicitly prohibit mining in the T&Cs, it's just that in the FAQ I wanted to be a bit more human and dissuade people.
Also, there's quite a few protections built-in at the network layer to make sure mining isn't possible. Ports, ips, dns, even DPI. I learnt a lot about the early days of bitcoin and mining protocols when I was building gpu.land:)
But again, thanks for sharing this. Really good to know.
Actually, I'm renting V100s. Got lucky to know the right person at the right time:)
The biggest difference is probably security / guaranteed uptime. With vast you're getting what it says on the tin - a machine from a marketplace. Could come from anyone / anywhere. No idea what else is running on it. Ours are hosted in a professional DC, managed and secured as they should be.
If anyone's curious, there's a detailed comparison page with other platforms here - https://gpu.land/versus
This was my first front-end project so any feedback 100% welcome.