So, salamander.ai has started disconnecting me. I have over $30 in credits, but it just disconnects me while I’m running my program.
This is the last in a series of many problems I’ve had trying to get this course to work - there’s a whole bunch of things that are supposed to work smoothly that instead just result in errors and having to google a forum topic, and I’m still not able to use the fast ai.structured module.
Jeremy’s lectures are great, but it feels like this course doesn’t want me to take it. Is there some other easy way to get a jupyter notebook up and running that people would recommend, that works more reliably?
Salamander relies on spot instances that are cheaper because AWS can take them away at any time for people paying the regular price. There are multiple cloud services detailed with tutorials on the coure page (click server setup in the navigation bar).
I’m using Google Colab most of the time, but I found vast.ai to be a good alternative for when Colab GPU is too slow. It provides really cheap GPUs e.g. GTX 1080 Ti for $0.14 and hour. It just take a bit more effort to setup as you have to install git, clone the fastai course repo, and install or upgrade pip packages. You can create a startup script to automatically setup the machine at start. Machines have a max duration showing and so far I’ve not seen them go away.