Hi there!

I have trained ImageNet several times myself, using both local and cloud resources.

I would recommend starting with a tutorial on how to get it running locally - there are many out there. As for the cloud resources, I found Google Cloud to be the best option in terms of cost/performance. In terms of expenses, the cost of training on ImageNet can be quite high, depending on the resources you use. As for the model, I would recommend running the model at least three times, so that you can get an accurate estimate of the performance. As for early stopping, I would recommend using the validation set - this will give you a more accurate representation of the model's performance.

Hope this helps!