this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Machine Learning

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Dear ML users/researchers, what hardware do you use? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I am looking to replace my old PC, and wondering what other people use.

Do you use your own hardware? If so, what do you have? What do you think gives you the most bang for your buck at the moment?

Do you use the cloud instead? If so, why? Which service(s) do you use?

Thank you!

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[–] tetelestia 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I do 95% of my personal stuff on a desktop with a GTX 1070, often remoting into it from a laptop. Someday soon I'll throw a bigger GPU in, but the 1070 has served me well for years.

I find the sunk cost of building a machine encourages me to use it more. I don't mind running something for a week even if I have no idea if it'll work or not.

Same deal at work, but with much beefier hardware. In both cases, I'll spin up a cloud instance if I want some results faster.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you! How much does the GTX 1070 help, compared to simply running your training runs on a recent CPU?

[–] tetelestia 2 points 1 year ago

Yes, the 1070 is substantially faster than CPU. Without benchmarking, I would guess 10-20x faster than a recent consumer CPU. In reality, unless you're interested in big NLP tasks or big computer vision models, a 1070 works just fine.

A 4090 might be 10x faster, so it turns a weekend job into an afternoon, or a month into a weekend, but plenty of real work can be done with a modest setup.

If I were building something from scratch on a budget, I'd look at the best 30-series Nvidia card I can afford. If you're using TensorFlow, TF32 is usually basically a free speed up, with PyTorch it's a bit less stable. You should be able to build a full system with a 3060 12GB for under $1000, or with a 3090 for under $2000.