Building Your Own Deep Learning Box

After completing Part 1 of Jeremy Howard's awesome deep learning course, I took a look at my AWS bill and found I was spending nearly $200/month running GPUs. It's not necessary to spend that much to complete his course, but I started working on a few extracurricular datasets in parallel and I was eager to get results. After talking with fellow students and reading a number of blog posts, I decided to try building my own box. Technology and hardware change so rapidly that I'm afraid much of post will become outdated soon, but I hope my general approach will still be useful for at least a little while. I started by reading a bunch of blogs to get the current consensus on which parts to buy.