Last week, a.k.a Week 7, October 11th-17th, I worked on the design review report with my team, and I contributed by writing the parts: Abstract, 5.2, 6.2, 7.2, 7.4, 8, and lastly, formatting and revising our Gantt chart + schedule. As my teammates have pointed out, this design report was clearly a poor reflection on our team as a whole, and there were many other parts of the project that we have explored in detail and should have added to the document, but we simply were not organized and could not meet the deadline, due to other classes, midterms and general lack of communication. My team and I hope this does not reflect extremely poorly on our group overall, as we will be addressing each and every concern that was raised in the design report evaluations and more, and will have a much more refined, detailed and accurate final report + project deliverable by the end of the semester.
To add onto the work I accomplished last week, I have been working on the model locally and ironing out bugs, and there was a very superficial but hard to find problem with conflicting Python library versions that took almost 3 days to discover and solve, but I also ran into another problem with running the code on AWS. Although I had initially made an instance using the free tier before we had received credits, I had eventually refined our design later on and pinpointed the exact instance I wanted to use – the P3 instance that uses the NVIDIA V100 GPUs, which should theoretically speed up our training process much more. Unfortunately, we hadn’t increased our vGPU limit, and AWS did not allow us to create an instance, so we had to apply for it, and we still hadn’t gotten back an answer after a full week.
Fortunately, we had already prepared for such things to happen, and we had deliberately added 2 weeks of slack/extra time to handle such things in our project, so although this software portion is basically a full week behind now due to the above listed complications, I am still confident that I can finish it in time to allow the hardware portion of the project to start and complete on time.
Looking forward to the coming week, I am aiming to finish the software portion by the end of the week, which James and Kunal are heavily involved with, as to not delay their progress. To address the concerns about my lack of work after this week, I will be helping Kunal and James with the integration portion of our project as much as possible, whilst actively participating in the other remaining aspects of the project to ensure it goes smoothly.