# Where can an undergraduate go to find cores on a budget?

I've may have reached a point in my neural network research that I cannot continue without significant financial investment.

I am using neuroevolution to evolve a network on the EMNIST data set. It is embarrassingly parallel (100 individuals * 116,323 records). The program is impossible to accelerate with a GPU. I have tried. This leaves OpenMP, which to my surprise is granting a speedup near-equal to the number of cores. However, even a 72-core Virtual Machine is projected to take 34 days (200 iterations, minimum), and set me back >$2,400. MPI is on my list of changes to make to the program, but (assuming seamless parallelization) the cores and time required will not change. Several combinations of virtual machines and core-counts (Amazon, Azure, Google) have revealed a cost estimate of$1,500-$2,500. For 1 experiment. Assuming that ALL settings are correct, and I do not need to run further experiments. I am a sophomore-level undergraduate. My university has NO computing clusters, nor access to any. The best they have are 8-core workstations (that would take a year to run the job). I don't have$1,500 to spare. Are there any resources (sponsors, grants, laboratories, etc) that would help me get the cores I need (cloud, or "home supercomputer")?

• Do you have an advisor, are you part of a research group, or is this your own independent study? – nengel Feb 26 '18 at 4:54
• I have an advisor, but this is ~99% me. – Derek Smith Feb 26 '18 at 4:55
• Have you talked to him about this? If he has contacts or even a second appointment at another university it may be possible to access some of their resources less formally, but otherwise you probably have to write up some kind of proposal. – nengel Feb 26 '18 at 5:00
• Do you need to SHOUT at us? – Najib Idrissi Feb 26 '18 at 10:19
• The big problem I see here is that each experiment is expected to consume almost 60k CPU-hours. On Stampede2, 10 repeats of this experiment would consume roughly 10,000 SUs, or "a pretty good starter allocation." In other words, unless you only need to run one or two runs of this program, you're very unlikely to find anyone with those kinds of resources lying around for free. I was going to point to the Jetstream Cloud trial allocation, but those are pitifully small, unfortunately. – chipbuster Feb 27 '18 at 23:52