What is Colaboratory?
Colaboratory, or Colab for short, is a free cloud-based Jupyter notebook environment provided by Google Research. Colab allows anyone to write and execute arbitrary Python code through the browser, and is especially well-suited to machine learning, data analysis and education.
Some of the key features that make Colab useful are:
- No setup required - Colab notebooks run entirely in the cloud, so you don't need to install any software or manage any servers.
- Free access to GPUs - Colab notebooks can connect to a Google Cloud GPU backend for hardware acceleration.
- Easy sharing and collaboration - Notebooks can be shared with others via a public link, allowing for real-time collaboration in the browser.
- Pre-installed machine learning packages - Common ML libraries like TensorFlow and PyTorch are already installed.
- Extensive example notebooks - Google provides many curated example notebooks showing how to use Colab for ML tasks.
With its flexibility, computing power and ease-of-use, Colab has become a very popular platform for learning, prototyping and sharing machine learning projects at any scale.