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Run Leela Zero client on a Tesla K80 GPU for free (Google Colaboratory)

Google Colaboratory (Colab) is a free tool for machine learning research. It's a Python notebook environment on a personal VM with a NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPU. Using Colab requires no installation and runs in your browser.

This example shows how to run a Leela Zero client on the K80 GPU to contribute training games. You can expect to contribute 60-80 games/day.

Google offers free and unlimited access to the GPU, but each session will stop running after 12 hours of use and need to be restarted. You must also keep the browser tab open. More details are below.

Do not use multiple accounts for training. Google has notified us they will block users for this.

Running the GPU client

  • Sign in to your Google account and open the notebook in Google Colab.
  • File -> Save a copy in Drive….
  • When the copied notebook opens, click Runtime -> Run All, which will run each of the cells in order. This will take around 10 minutes to complete.

Note: Google offers unlimited access to the GPU, but each session will stop running after 12 hours of use and need to be restarted. The animated spinning "stop" symbol will turn into a static red "play" symbol when the cell has stopped. You can restart with Runtime -> Restart Runtime followed by Runtime -> Run All. A simple macro would work to automate the restarting process.

A session will also stop if you close the browser tab running Colab (about ~1.5 hours after closing the tab). To ensure the client runs for the full 12 hours, please keep the tab open.

Troubleshooting

  • If you get a "signal: aborted (core dumped)" error when running the client or "failed to assign a backend" popup (examples below), there are no GPUs available on Google Colab. Try Runtime -> Restart Runtime and running again, or kill the entire VM with !kill -9 -1 and try again (VM may take 5 minutes to restart after being killed). As Google Colab has a limited number of free GPUs, you may just have to try again another time.
cl::Error
what():  clGetPlatformIDs
2018/04/18 14:52:31 signal: aborted (core dumped)

No GPUs

  • If the notebook appears to be stuck in "Initializing" and won't run, try restarting as above. After restart, you should see "Connected" with a green checkmark.

Other Platforms

  • Other paid platforms offer a similar service as Google Colab (Jupyter notebook Python environment for machine learning). For example, FloydHub offers a free 2-hour Tesla K80 GPU trial, and a working Jupyter notebook is available here (developed by @scs-ben).