Playing with Google Colab: CPUs, GPUs, and TPUs

Google offers a truly intuitive tool for training neural networks and for playing with TensorFlow at no cost. You can find an actual Colab, which can be freely accessed, at https://colab.research.google.com/ and if you are familiar with Jupyter notebooks you will find a very familiar web-based environment here. Colab stands for Colaboratory and is a Google research project created to help disseminate machine learning education and research. We will see the difference between CPUs, GPUs, and TPUs in Chapter 15, Tensor Processing Unit.

For now, it’s important to know that CPUs are generic processing units, while GPUs and TPUs are accelerators, specific processing units suitable for deep learning. Let’s see how it works, starting with the screenshot shown in Figure 1.23:

Figure 1.23: An example of notebooks in Colab

By accessing Colab, we can either check a listing of notebooks generated in the past or we...