Deep Learning with PyTorch

Hardware availability

Deep learning requires complex mathematical operations to be performed on millions, sometimes billions, of parameters. Existing CPUs take a long time to perform these kinds of operations, although this has improved over the last several years. A new kind of hardware called a graphics processing unit (GPU) has completed these huge mathematical operations, such as matrix multiplications, orders of magnitude faster.

GPUs were initially built for the gaming industry by companies such as Nvidia and AMD. It turned out that this hardware is extremely efficient, not only for rendering high quality video games, but also to speed up the DL algorithms. One recent GPU from Nvidia, the 1080ti, takes a few days to build an image-classification ...