Google Cloud Platform ☁️

Colaboratory Frequently Asked Questions The Basics What is Colaboratory?link Colab is a hosted Jupyter Notebook service that requires no setup to use and provides free of charge access to computing resources, including GPUs and TPUs. Colab is especially well suited to machine learning, data science, and education. Is it really free of charge to use?link Yes. Colab is free of charge to use. Seems too good to be true. What are the limitations?link In order to provide access to as many students and under-resourced groups around the world as possible, Colab prioritizes users who are actively programming in a notebook. Colab also restricts actions that negatively impact others or are associated with bypassing our anti-abuse policies. See Which activities are restricted in Colab? for a list of actions that are disallowed. Colab resources are not guaranteed and not unlimited, and usage limits sometimes fluctuate. This is necessary for Colab to be able to provide resources free of charge. For more details, see Resource Limits. Which activities are restricted in Colab?link Colab managed runtimes prohibit abusive actions that negatively impact others and actions associated with bypassing our policies. The following are disallowed from all managed Colab runtimes: file hosting, media serving, or other web service offerings not related to interactive compute with Colab downloading torrents or engaging in peer-to-peer file-sharing connecting to remote proxies mining cryptocurrency running denial-of-service attacks password cracking using multiple accounts to work around access or resource usage restrictions creating deepfakes Unfortunately it is not possible to provide more specificity in how our abuse detection system works as bad actors try to take advantage of the compute subsidies Colab offers. In addition to these restrictions, and in order to provide access to students and under-resourced groups around the world, Colab prioritizes users who are actively programming in a notebook. The following are disallowed from managed Colab runtimes running free of charge, without a positive Colab compute unit balance, and may be terminated at any time without warning: remote control such as SSH shells, remote desktops bypassing the notebook UI to interact primarily via a web UI chess training running distributed computing workers You can remove these types of restrictions by purchasing one of our paid plans here and maintaining a positive compute unit balance. You may find not all runtimes that match the descriptions are terminated; we attempt to support as much as we can within reason to benefit the global community. You can purchase guaranteed resources without Colab-enforced usage limitations via GCP Marketplace or Colab Enterprise or use your own compute via a local runtime you control. Note that Google Drive mounting on the runtime filesystem will not work with these approaches. Why does my Colab runtime keep terminating prematurely?link In order to provide access to students and under-resourced groups around the world, Colab prioritizes users who are actively programming in a notebook. Users in our free of charge tier commonly experience runtime terminations when attempting to bypass the notebook UI and using a web UI on a Colab managed runtime for content generation. These experiences are popular and impressive, but are compute intensive and fall outside our priorities for our free of charge tier users, who we want to help in programming. You can remove these types of restrictions by purchasing one of our paid plans here. You can purchase guaranteed resources without Colab-enforced usage limitations via GCP Marketplace or Colab Enterprise or use your own compute via a local runtime you control. Note that Google Drive mounting on the runtime filesystem will not work with these approaches. What is the difference between Jupyter and Colab?link Jupyter is the open source project on which Colab is based. Colab allows you to use and share Jupyter notebooks with others without having to download, install, or run anything. Using Colab Where are my notebooks stored, and can I share them?link Colab notebooks are stored in Google Drive, or can be loaded from GitHub. Colab notebooks can be shared just as you would with Google Docs or Sheets. Simply click the Share button at the top right of any Colab notebook, or follow these Google Drive file sharing instructions. If I share my notebook, what will be shared?link If you choose to share a notebook, the full contents of your notebook (text, code, output, and comments) will be shared. You can omit code cell output from being saved or shared by using Edit > Notebook settings > Omit code cell output when saving this notebook. The virtual machine you’re using, including any custom files and libraries that you’ve setup, will not be shared. So it’s a good idea to include cells which install and load any custom libraries or files that your notebook needs. Can I impor