A data scientist or machine learning engineer often needs the power of GPU to perform powerful calculations using deep neural network architectures. As a data science professional, you will have access to powerful laptops by your company itself, but as a student, you can either buy a good laptop with a powerful GPU or find services for accessing GPU for free. As a student, having access to a free GPU seems like a better deal than buying an expensive laptop. So, if you want to know how to access free GPU for machine learning or deep learning, this article is for you. In this article, I will introduce you to some of the best platforms to access free GPU for machine learning.
Using Free GPU for Machine Learning
If you are a data science student, you might need the power of the GPU for heavy calculations. For example, training a machine learning model on very large data with many features. If you are just a beginner and learning the basics, don’t worry about the GPU, you can use any laptop with a good configuration at the start of your data science journey. But if you work on machine learning projects regularly, you can get a better laptop according to your budget or access free GPU services. So here are some of the best platforms that will give you free access to GPU for machine learning or deep learning.
Google Colaboratory
Google Colab or Colaboratory is a Jupyter Notebook that lets you write and execute your code in the Google Cloud for free. It is easy to use because you don’t even need to install Python in your system to use Google Colab. It provides you with free access to GPU for machine learning that you can use as a data science student. Data Science professionals also use Google Colab, some data science professionals prefer to use Colab Pro, where you get access to faster GPUs and TPUs, while some are happy with the free Colab services. So you can use Colab to access free GPU as a data science student while working on heavy machine learning problems. You can also use it as a beginner in data science as the cell by cell coding helps to analyze your data better.
Kaggle Kernels
Kaggle is another platform from Google which is a data science community where you can participate in competitions and access a large collection of datasets to practice your data science skills. Kaggle kernels also offer free access to GPUs, just like Google Colab, which can speed up training models up to 12.5x. Kaggle kernels may be preferred over Colab if you want to participate in a data science competition or want to use another programming language instead of Python, as Google Colab only supports Python.
Summary
Google Colab and Kaggle kernels are some of the best ways to access free GPU for machine learning or deep learning. As a student, having access to a free GPU sounds like a better deal than purchasing an expensive laptop. I hope you liked this article on how to get free GPUs for machine learning or deep learning. Feel free to ask your valuable questions in the comments section below.
