Implementing a GAN from scratch

In this section, we will cover how to implement and train a GAN model to generate new images such as MNIST digits. Since the training on a normal central processing unit (CPU) may take a long time, in the following subsection, we will cover how to set up the Google Colab environment, which will allow us to run the computations on graphics processing units (GPUs).

Training GAN models on Google Colab

Some of the code examples in this chapter may require extensive computational resources that go beyond a commercial laptop or a workstation without a GPU. If you already have an NVIDIA GPU-enabled computing machine available, with CUDA and cuDNN libraries installed, you can use that to speed up the computations.

However, since many of us do not have access to high-performance computing resources, we will use the Google Colaboratory environment (often referred to as Google Colab), which is a free cloud computing service (available in most countries...