$100 GPU credit and easy fast.ai notebooks on Spell

Hi all!

ann from the Spell team :wave: We’d excited to introduce our cloud GPU offering for fast.ai students.

We spent some time getting the fast.ai notebooks to work easily with Spell. We’re fast.ai learners ourselves and wanted to make sure to make it super simple for learners to get up and running with the fast.ai notebooks.

We’re really proud to offer what we think is a simple, fast, and reliable cloud GPU service that’ll keep up with your machine learning needs.

To run the notebooks, sign up for a Spell account and install the CLI tool in terminal. You’ll automatically activate your $100 credit once you sign up and enter your billing information. We email you when you have $20 credit left (and you can set additional custom notifications) so you’ll never be hit with unexpected charges.

To get started, just run the following commands in terminal (more detail in our docs):

$ pip install spell
$ spell login

Then grab the course materials and start your fast.ai Jupyter notebook:

$ git clone https://github.com/fastai/fastai.git && cd fastai
$ spell jupyter --machine-type K80 \
                --conda-env fastai \
                --mount public/tutorial/fast.ai:data

Jupyter will be running locally, but be wired to a kernel with a K80 and the fast.ai conda environment loaded. Once Jupyter starts, switch to the “Spell - fastai on K80” kernel by clicking “Change kernel” under the Kernel menu (you only have to do this once).

Remember to stop your session (^C ^C in terminal) so you don’t get charged for an open notebook you’re not actively using!

Spell is a command line tool for super simple remote execution - like the bash & operator, but for sending work off to a cloud instance. It’s great for developing for deep learning locally but seamlessly running on a cloud GPU.

Questions/feedback welcome - we’ll be hanging out here and in slack!

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Are “registrations” really open or is it an invite to join the waiting list?

If it’s just the waiting list, it would be helpful to have it clearly mentioned in the post along with a rough timeline.

Thanks.

Hi Aakash,

Yup! We’re approving everyone off the waitlist as quickly as we can while we put the final touches on open sign ups. The waitlist should be completely removed in the next day or two.

I just approved you so you should be able to access your account now. Let me know if you have any questions getting started!

We’re really looking forward to hearing your feedback :slight_smile:

Detailed pricing information is here.

Look forward to hearing what you think!

@aakashp sorry for the delay - open sign ups are live at spell.run!

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Thanks @s_ann or letting me know. I’ve PM’ed you my feedback.

Just to double check, the $100 sign up credit is only for CPU as it says on the billing page and not for GPU as it says on this forum heading, correct?

@aakashp thank you!

Sorry for the confusion. CPU use is free, the $100 credit applies to GPU.

Thanks for checking!

Thanks to a great suggestion from a user on the forums here, we put together a getting started with fast.ai and Spell video tutorial.

Hopefully this helps give a sense of what the experience is like! And we’re always here to answer questions if any come up.

We look forward to hearing your feedback on the video + Spell!

2 Likes

Is this offer still on?

Hi @bluesky314 yup it’s still going. Sign up here and the credit will be automatically applied to your account.

@s_ann is the credits trimmed down to $10 now?

Hi @zszazi, we changed the credits once we launched our new platform in January of this year. We now offer $10 GPU credit on sign up and $15 for you + a friend for every friend you refer. CPU use is still free for Community users.

We’ve added a bunch of new features including Jupyter Notebooks+Jupyter Lab for Community users, and features for Teams users such as Hyperparameter Search, Model Serving, Distributed Training, and Spot Instances to name a few.

We’d love for you to check out the platform and tell us what you think!

1 Like