Benchmarking Machine Learning (Hint: It can get expensive)

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Shiv Manne ran a whole bunch of tests against GPU instances from platform providers like AWS, GCE, Paperspace, Softlayer, etc., and the results were…interesting. Not surprising mind you, just interesting.
The lede — high end GPUs get very expensive very fast. Yes, they train wicked fast, but the ROI, frankly, sux. In fact, the best deal seems to be to run lower-end single-GPU instances (more info on this here).
Why single-GPU? Largely because, right now, support for multi-GPU either doesn’t work, or when it does, seems to be surprisingly inefficient. Go figure!
Paperspace seems to be on the game here, both for costs, and for performance. In fact, if you’re just testing stuff, they’re pretty much your best bet, as seems to be validated elsewhere too.
And, of course, the obvious remains — AWS is expensive, and GCE is not .
The results are below, but go take a look at the whole post.
Note: There is also a study on just using the instances — the bottom line being, well, YMMV depending on your familiarity with the tooling.

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