Learning Data Mining with Python

Chapter 11
Getting your code to run on a GPU can be a frustrating experience. It depends
greatly on what type of GPU you have, how it is configured, your operating system,
and whether you are prepared to make some low-level changes to your computer.
There are three main avenues to take:
• The first is to look at your computer, search for tools and drivers for your
GPU and operating system, explore some of the many tutorials out there,
and find one that fits your scenario. Whether this works depends on what
your system is like. That said, this scenario is much easier than it was a few
years ago, with better tools and drivers available to perform GPU-enabled
computation.
• The second avenue is to choose a system, find good documentation on
setting it up, and buy a system to match. This will work better, but can be
fairly expensive—in most modern computers, the GPU is one of the most
expensive parts. This is especially true if you want to get great performance
out of the system—you'll need a really good GPU, which can be very
expensive.
• The third avenue is to use a virtual machine, which is already configured for
such a purpose. For example, Markus Beissinger has created such a system
that runs on Amazon's Web Services. The system will cost you money to
run, but the price is much less than that of a new computer. Depending on
your location, the exact system you get and how much you use it, you are
probably looking at less than $1 an hour, and often much, much less. If you
use spot instances in Amazon's Web Services, you can run them for just a few
cents per hour (although, you will need to develop your code to run on spot
instances separately).
If you aren't able to afford the running costs of a virtual machine, I recommend that
you look into the first avenue, with your current system. You may also be able to
pick up a good secondhand GPU from family or a friend who constantly updates
their computer (gamer friends are great for this!).
Running our code on a GPU
We are going to take the third avenue in this chapter and create a virtual machine
based on Markus Beissinger's base system. This will run on an Amazon's EC2 service.
There are many other Web services to use, and the procedure will be slightly
different for each. In this section, I'll outline the procedure for Amazon.
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