Recommendations for hardware acceleration for AI work

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Hi! I'm a student at a research university, and I've recently been doing a lot of work with MATLAB and deep learning. I really enjoy it and plan to pursue it as a focal point of my career. Something I'm figuring out pretty quick is that in order to do serious AI work, you need some dedicated hardware to go with it. Right now, I'm working off a 16in MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM, and the last neural network I trained took roughly an hour. Getting that time down would help a lot with my work.
I was thinking of getting an eGPU connected via thunderbolt to speed things up. I know that GPU acceleration requires an nVidia GPU, which unfortunatly, are not officially supported by Apple. Ideally, I'd prefer to not have to boot-camp into Windows every time I need to use MATLAB. Are there "unofficial" workarounds that would allow me to use GPU acceleration w/ MATLAB on macOS? And if so, could anyone recommend a good GPU that would give me solid performance for a decent value? I'm willing to spend around $1000 - $2000 on this.
Another possible option: since I'm at a university I have access to a pretty robust set of super computers. Is it possible to offload deep learning training to a supercomputer via an internet connection? If so, is there an article anyone could link me to that would instruct me how to do that?
Thanks in advance!

Answers (3)

Star Strider
Star Strider on 4 Dec 2020
The Webinar on Artificial Intelligence with MATLAB has already come and gone, however contacting Brad could be of some benefit in deciding on your optimal hardware resources.

Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 4 Dec 2020
There are no drivers available for Mac for Ampere architecture or Pascal architecture, not for any MacOS.
High Sierra was the last release for Nvidia support for Mac.
Current MATLAB do not support GPU for Mac.

Raymond Norris
Raymond Norris on 5 Dec 2020
Your university has some documentation about running MATLAB & MATLAB Parallel Server at your site. Get in touch with me if you can't find the links.
Alternatively, what are you thoughts on running GPU instances on the cloud. Here are some links describing how to get started

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