i-heart-turtles t1_isozegx wrote on October 17, 2022 at 4:58 PM

I'm not a google fanboy or anything, but I was under the impression that the colab compute units was basically how colab operated before via gcp, it was just hidden from the user... now the system just shows you explicitly your quota. I personally appreciate more being told exactly how much compute I have left in my bucket so I can manage more carefully and be less wasteful.

Anyways I like the colab frontend a lot & integration with google drive more then the other offerings I tried, but it's just my opinion.

neuroguy123 t1_ispbbs0 wrote on October 17, 2022 at 6:18 PM

I have been a long time user of Colab Pro+ and that might be true, but I have noticed a significant difference in the quality of GPU I get now. You can specify a 'premium' GPU now vs standard. I can get an A100-40Gb any time I want right now, whereas before that was rare. For 100 credits you can train for about 6.5 hours on that. Anyway, I think you're right that they just give you more transparency, but you also get more choice in how aggressively you want to spend the credits. I suspect that the A100s are more available now after these changes.

When I want to use Colab, what I do now is develop on my desktop machine until I have everything working properly and then just train as needed on Colab when I need more compute.