I didn't snipe. This is life advice. Get a part time job. If you're in North America (Canada or US) and you can't squeeze out $400-600 from your budget over the period of a year, you're making excuses, pure and simple. Cook at home, drop cable subscription, don't go to Starbucks, do part time jobs, and so on and so forth. That's what students did back when I was one.

I’m in Germany, have a part time job, cook at home, have no cable subscription, don’t go to starbucks, buy food if possible at ALDI.

Rent has been going up every year, but wages haven’t, so by now for me, rent for a small apartment is over 60% of my monthly income.

The world has changed quite a bit since you were a student.

Might not be applicable for you, but maybe see if you can get a grant from your school? I'm going to try that this quarter to see if I can get some gpus

My student years were in Moscow in early 90's amid chaos and hyperinflation. Even there, I would be able to scrape together a few hundred bucks for something that's critical to my academic success. Get a roommate, maybe? Find a better paying part time job? I'm having a hard time imagining someone who can program and who writes papers about machine learning not being able to find a decent paying part time job anywhere in the world.

> for something that's critical to my academic success

Well, that’s the problem. It’s not. I can pass this and get the same grade no matter if I have good results or not. With CPU training, the paper just ends up ignored.

If it was critical for my success, I’d definitely find a way to do it, but that’s the point, it’s not critical – it would just improve my results.

You're confusing your grade with academic success. Those two things are related, but not the same. If this is something you want to pursue, go after it. Grades matter, but they're not the only thing that matters.

I’m still in undergrad/studying for B.Sc., so it’s not like I’m expected to do actual science, but you’re right indeed.

There was a thread recently, maybe on reddit, about a facebook group or somewhere people give away ec2 or azure credits to people who want to do HPC or deep learning or whatever. But i can't google it.