See this great article by Anne Bommer on getting started with Google Colab.
One of the major advantages of Colab is it offers free GPU support (with limits placed of course – check their FAQ).It runs completely in the cloud and enables you to share your work, save to your google drive directly and offers resources for compute power. Google Colab is a FREE Jupyter notebook environment provided by Google specially for Deep Learning tasks.Once you see it is completed the set-up process, click START and once it is in operation, click OPEN and you will be taken to a new tab with your Jupyter Notebook instance.Once completed, you will be taken to the page where your tool of choice (a Jupyter Notebook instance) will be configuring and getting ready.Because it is a free account, you will be limited to 4GB RAM and a 1 Core CPU. Then you will be asked to set some configurations such as the amount of RAM and cores.Give it a name and description and click CREATE. Here, click on the green button on the top right corner to start a new project. You will then be prompted to a Projects page.Sign-up for the service to create an account.To get started with a Jupyter notebook environment in MatrixDS: The platform provides GPU support as needed so that memory heavy and compute heavy tasks can be accomplished when a local machine is not sufficient. The paid tier is similar to what is offered on the major cloud platforms where by you can pay by usage or time. They offer both free and paid tiers as well.They provide some of the most used technologies such as R, Python, Shiny, MongoDB, NGINX, Julia, MySQL, PostgreSQL. MatrixDS is a cloud platform that provides a social network type experience combined with GitHub that is tailored for sharing your Data Science projects with peers.Many Data Scientists do not have the necessary hardware for conducting large scale Deep Learning, but with cloud hosted environments, the hardware and backend configurations are mostly taken care which leaves the user to only configure their desired parameters such as CPU/GPU/TPU, RAM, Cores etc.
Many cloud providers, and other third-party services, see the value of a Jupyter notebook environment which is why many companies now offer cloud hosted notebooks that are hosted on the cloud and accessible to millions of people. Regular IDE’s do not stop compilation even if an error is detected and depending on the amount of code, it can be a waste of time to go back and manually detect where the error is located.
One of the best features although simple is that the notebook would stop compiling your code if it spots an error. The notebook environment allows us to keep track of errors and maintain clean code. Jupyter notebook environments are now becoming the first destination in the journey to productizing your data science project. The Increasing Popularity of Jupyter Notebook Environments One of the main differences can be multi-language support and version control options that allow Data Scientists to share their work in one place. Other players have now begun to offer cloud hosted Jupyter environments, with similar storage, compute and pricing structures. Many cloud providers offer machine learning and deep learning services in the form of Jupyter notebooks. Notebooks are becoming the de-facto standard for prototyping and analysis for Data Scientists.