Setting up Lizzie and Leela Zero in a cloud?

[Pippen]

I have a laptop with just Windows Vista and not much power, I can neither run Lizzie nor LZ there, so I am looking for options without buying a new computer. One a way seems to be going "Cloud", i.e. connecting to a cloud that behaves just like a second computer, runs with Windows 7 or better, where I can install and run those programs, but all that from my fellow Laptop. This would be also a good testcase in gernal, because it would mean I don't need to buy new computers every 5 years.

1. How do you call such a Cloud/Cloud-Service since there are many names around but I'm doubtful they mean what I want?
2. Are there such Clouds already there, maybe even with a free trial to check if things work?

[jeromie]

I'm intending to try the same thing soon. I think an Amazon EC2 P2 or P3 instance looks promising.

[Drew]

A Linux VPS with scalable hardware would be a better approach.

[quantumf]

Pippen, Amazon EC2 is one of a number of cloud providers that can do what you want. Microsoft Azure would be another, and I presume Google cloud as well (although I'm less sure about them). The advantage of a cloud computer is that you can start it when you want to play/analyze, and turn it off when you're done - thus paying only for when you use it. The downside is that you might have to wait for a minute or so for the instance to start up each time, which you might find irritating.

Amazon to offer a free tier (one year free "t2.micro"), this won't be powerful enough to play Lizzie particularly well, but it will be sufficient to figure out how to install the software and so on.

Drew, please advise how a flexible Linux VPS would work? What does flexible mean, and in what way(s) is it better than a cloud instance?

[Pippen]

I tried Google Cloud and Azure because they offered free trials.

Google Cloud functioned per se. I did e.g. upload Leela 11 and it played there with significant more playouts per minute than on my laptop. But I couldn't start Lizzie & LZ due to some java installation problems (despite intalling Java correctly on my VM) nor Sabaki & LZ despite following closely a how-to-do-it video.

Azure I couldn't even connect to the VM in the cloud.

So both failed and a reminder why a free trial is so important. I will buy a new computer at some day, clouds have too many imponderables for a non-expert. Moreover I read that the author of Leela at some point wants to make LZ like Leela 11 - a program you can easily run. Hope that is not too far off either.

[Pippen]

Benjamin Teuber wrote a guide on how to set up Leela Zero on Google Cloud: https://github.com/bsteuber/lizzie-gcloud-setup

It's only for linux.

There are even more detailed instructions in a Leela Zero community-maintained document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P_c ... xjD64/edit

This is just if you want to participate to train LZ, not if you want to use it with Lizzie for personal teaching.

[spook]

AWS GPU instances start at around 0.9$/hour.
So, if you study/play about 1 hour per day, you will quickly pay roughly 27$/mo.

By comparison, ZBaduk is free, does the same thing, and offers a GUI which is available in a webbrowser. (also mobile)
(no need to install anything).

SCR4.png (51.06 KiB) Viewed 11874 times

ZBaduk won't be free forever. (Enjoy it while you can ).
Having said that, a commercial plan is roughly 200 times cheaper than AWS, and unlimited in use.

[Umsturz]

As long as you can run ssh locally, you can use Leela Zero on Google Cloud.

And the detailed instructions show how to configure the Google Cloud instance; of course you can adapt them to running Leela vis SSH.

Did you get Lizzie running on windows connected to a gcloud instance?

[iopq]

Benjamin Teuber wrote a guide on how to set up Leela Zero on Google Cloud: https://github.com/bsteuber/lizzie-gcloud-setup

It's only for linux.

There are even more detailed instructions in a Leela Zero community-maintained document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P_c ... xjD64/edit

This is just if you want to participate to train LZ, not if you want to use it with Lizzie for personal teaching.

If you actually tried it, you could have easily done it on Windows for analysis

You don't need to use the provided scripts