Exploring free Alternatives (GPU) to Google Colab

04 Jul, 2024

Hello World!

Table of Contents

1. What is Google Colab?
2. Alternatives to Google Colab
   • Kaggle Notebooks
   • AWS SageMaker Studio Lab
   • Lightning AI
   • Cloud Options for Enterprises
3. Which one to Choose?
4. Further Reading

Google Colab has long been the go-to platform for AI enthusiasts, allowing them to quickly prototype their projects through a generous free tier. However, in this AI era of rapid advancements, we tend to overlook other available options that far surpass what Google Colab has to offer.

TL;DR AWS SageMaker Studio Labs (Balanced solution for daily use with persistent storage), Lightning AI (Full blown System perfect for deep learning projects) and Kaggle Notebooks.

What is Google Colab?

Powered by Google's infrastructure, Colab provides a Jupyter¹ notebook environment (GPU support as well) that allows users to write and execute Python code.

In this post, we'll explore some compelling alternatives to Google Colab which address the two main shortcomings of Google Colab: frequent disconnects and unavailability of persistent storage.

Alternatives to Google Colab

Let's explore some alternatives to Colab. We'll cover the pros and cons of each, and then compare them.

Kaggle Notebooks

• 30 hours of GPU time per week
• 2x T4 GPUs + Other options
• 4 CPUs and a generous 29GB of RAM.
• Provides Persistent storage

AWS SageMaker Studio Lab

• 4 GPU hours and 8 CPU hours daily
• T4 GPU access
• 15 GB Persistent storage for your projects
• Integrated Terminal and File system

Lightning AI

• 22 GPU hours per month.
• Unlimited CPU access on a 4-core machine.
• GPU and CPU Type can be changed on demand.
• A full blown workstation with Persistent Storage

Cloud Options for Enterprises

Azure ML Notebooks, Google Vertex AI Notebooks, and Amazon SageMaker Notebooks come with a variety of GPU options and persistent storage, along with the added benefit of full integration with their respective cloud ecosystems. Though paid, each cloud platform offers initial free credits.

Which one do I Choose?

Try them all and choose what suits you. My personal recommendation would be AWS SageMaker Studio Lab.

Exercise for the reader: Try running a LLM like Gemma 2 in Google Colab or any of the other alternatives. [ Solution ]

Further Reading

If you're interested in running large language models on these platforms, you might want to learn about LLM quantization to make these models smaller and less resource-hungry. Check out our blog post on LLM Quantization to learn more.

Footnotes:

#guide