Yeah, yeah, yeah... So how are you gonna write off the Valve INDEX and STEAM VR Library...?
mnem
No, seriously. I wanna know how...
well, since last Monday my job is to:
- push forward our deep learning machine translation system
- integrate our translation memories
- develop specifically trained models
- look into speech to text on GPU and FPGA
- look into OCR
- look into BOTs which sport their own NNs
My boss wants me to get out of the daily operational doing into the more architecture / directonal stuff
Prereq is that I know what I am doing. Another prereq is that I can slug it out with the other (especially HPC) guys in our company
So it is quite mandatory for me to build up skill fast.
Skills that I need to build up fast are:
CUDA / OpenCL
C / C++
Tensorflow, PyTorch
Plus of course all you could possibly need to know about neural networks and the deployment side of it, training them, setting up framework, ...
Also deliver ball park figures on how long it takes to train that stuff, hardware prereqs, energy consumption, ROI calculations, ...
And to do that I need first hand knowledge. Not something out of the book. you cannot really discuss things (especially pitfalls, show stoppers etc) when you have not overcome them yourself.
Now I have some first hand experience with Pascal (4 Tesla P100), some know how with Turing (several abused 2070s), and I need to get some Ampere know how.
For this I have a 3060ti, 3080 and 3090. you cannot get anything as powerful as a 3090 with 24GB of memory for less than what they charge you. The alternative would have been their quadro successor, which is an A6000 running an ampere GPU with 48 GB of mem. I cannot justify that as personal expense.
I currently have about 3 to 4 official proposals for improvement/increasing efficiency. If one of them gets accepted and implemented, I will get a sizeable portion of the savings (about 10 - 25% of the first year savings). Last time (last year) it amounted to about 40% of my annual salary which for a non management position in Germany is very high already.
If I can make this fly it will result in a promotion (to the last step in the non management career ladder) giving me a raise of about 10 - 15% of my income. Which is an outlook for which it is worth to invest 2200 €.
Apart from that the card will be used as an appartment heater when not working on Tensorflow models. That should give me a warm cuddly feeling and additional 10 - 15 USD ROI a day.
No playing with it though. The most challenging game I played was Civ 2 and even that was considerable time ago. And tbh I do not need 420 fps on Solitaire.