[annnnd]

Why $150k? Ordinary GPU (<$1k) would probably be equivalent to 56 CPU cores, if not faster.

I imagine the reason for using CPU was that they would throw it out anyway, so there was no need to make an ideal solution - and they already had those 56 CPU cores.

[aureliengasser]

That's precisely why, indeed. This 56-core machine is what was at hand at that moment. Genetic algorithms is something we tried, but we didn't have enough confidence in it to invest too much money and effort. Which was a good call, since we soon realized there was a much better approach.

[gaius]

That was just the price of some nVidia kit I was looking at, roughly.

[annnnd]

I had no idea they have this, but it would probably be an overkill for SO. An ordinary (nVidia) GPU which starts at $150 is roughly >10 times faster at NN problems than 4 core CPU.

[gaius]

This: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-1/

[asadlionpk]

Or you can spin an instance on AWS of your choosing?

[annnnd]

Yes, of course. I seem to remember that their data is still in their own datacenter though, so they might not be comfortable with using Amazon for this.