- Hello, welcome to a new video series.

I'm very excited about this video series

'cause I'm going to show you how to write some code.

I always show you how to write code, well, not always,

but typically I show you how to write code,

and then I run the code on this computer here.

And what I'm going to show you is how to write code here

and have it run somewhere else.

And this can be very useful for a lot of reasons.

One of the main reasons these days you might want to do that

is to run your code on a more powerful computer

that can do some kind of machine learning task

that might take all night,

and you can just be playing your

whatever other video game

and checking your email

while that's going

and get the results when it's done.

And I'm going to show you how to do this

with a particular platform called Spell.

And this video is sponsored by Spell.

So I'm going to do a couple things.

I'm going to talk about what is Spell.

I'm going to show you how to use it

and I'm going to run a simple example

with just one little Python script

that I make on this computer,

run it over there and see the results.

Then look in this video's description,

there will be links to two upcoming

live streams with two guests.

First, Nabil Hassein is going to come

and show you how to train an LSTM,

Long Short-Term Memory network.

It's a special kind of neural network model

that's useful for working with sequences,

and in particular you could generate text

as a sequence of characters with it.

So we're going to look at

how to train an LSTM model using spell.run,

and then have that model that you've trained

work with, say, the ML5 TensorFlow.js library,

an ML5 or a TensorFlow.js library.

Then Yining Shi,

who has previously appeared

on The Coding Train

in the Brick Breaker Tutorial,

she's going to come and show you

some stuff about working with images,

maybe we'll do style transfer,

maybe we'll do Pix 2 Pix, maybe both.

And so she'll come and show you how to train a model

for those concepts and execute that on Spell,

and then also work with that with the ML5.js library.

So you could check the video's description

for the times of both those live streams.

You can tune in live and ask your questions,

or simply watch if the live streams have already happened

and you're watching this video, just click the link,

and you'll be able to watch it right there.

Okay wonderful.

Alright so first,

let's talk about what is Spell.

So I've talked about the idea of

client side programming

and server side programming,

and this is sort of a similar thing

in the sense that we do have a client computer,

my laptop which is like The Coding Train,

then there is this service which is called Spell,

if I could spell Spell, that would be good,

which has lots and lots of computers

sitting there somewhere in the cloud.

They have computers with different CPUs, GPUs,

and I'll kind of get to that

as we go through all this material.

So typically if I'm talking about client server,

I might be saying you program your website,

then you upload your website to some server

and then other people can access your website.

This is different.

What we're talking about is

allowing these computers to act as

a cloud computing resource essentially

that you can write a script,

so maybe you have this Python script,

you set up your entire Python environment on your computer,

the Python script works with it and you can just say,

with typing in just the instruction,

spell run my script.py.

This will get sent to a particular server,

one that you've requested,

the kind of server you've requested,

you're not requesting a specific computer,

you're requesting the kind of computer, I want this GPU.

GPU by the way means Graphics Processing Unit,

and that typically is a powerful processor

that's really useful with machine learning models.

So you're going to request a particular kind of computer.

It's going to run it, it might finish,

it might generate some files,

like maybe it's going to say,

hey here's your poem,

or here's your image.

And then you could request

to ask for the results back.

And if that task takes hours or even days

which is not crazy at all in the world

of running machine learning models,

you can send it, close your computer,

check, go to the library,

get on the computer there,

go to the Spell website,

see what the progress is,

go to sleep, wake up, check the progress,

did I get a notification?

All sorts of things are possible when it's done.

So this is exactly what I want to show you.

And in case you're following along,

this is my kind of mental list of all the pieces,

a little outline of what I'm showing.

So really all I've done so far

is talk about what is Spell.

The next thing I want to do is install Spell.

Okay so the first thing that I want to do

is just go right to the spell.run website.

I'll link to it in this video's description,

but it's pretty easy to type it in right to your browser.

The next thing you're going to want to do is click Sign Up

and sign up for an account with your email address,

name and email.

I already have done that so I'm just going to log in.

You pause this video and sign up for an account

if you want to follow along.

And then I'm now logged in,

and you'll notice I'm getting this message,

Spell is offering a $100 GPU credit,

meaning you can use their GPU machines for free

up to what would normally cost $100.

You'll have to enter a credit card

on the billing page

to unlock that feature,

and afterwards there's a charge per hour

using the resources.

I will note that they have

a good notification system set up

so you can set it up to warn you

whenever you're down to this much,

so you should never see

any unexpected charges on your card.

Okay so once you're signed up,

the first thing you want to do is type this,

pip install spell.

That is now where do you type that?

So one thing I should mention

is there are couple prerequisites

for this following along this tutorial.

One is you're going to need to have a Python environment.

Most computers kind of come with Python installed

or you can install it,

and I'll link to a few resources

for installing Python.

I'm using a particular tool

in this video called virtualenv,

virtual environment,

that lets me create a Python environment

that I can kind of like turn on and turn off.

Useful.

You're also going to need to know something about Git,

how Git works in order to work with Spell.

And I will also link,

I mean I have a video tutorial series

about Git and GitHub as well

which I will link to you,

but those are prerequisites.

Once you have a Python environment set up,

you should be able to go to any terminal, console,

application that you're using and type in pip,

Python package something rather install spell.

So I'm going to go to, I'm using iTerm,

and you can see that I'm on the Desktop,

and this spell-demo, this is a message

that's showing to me that's part of virtual environment,

so I have my spell.demo virtual environment set up,

and so I can just write pip install spell,

and then I can wait, dot dot, dot dot, oh, that was so fast,

and it is installed.

And I know it's installed because now if I type spell,

we can see that it's, something is happening.

Normally if I would just type spell into the console,

into the terminal, it would say I don't know what that is.

Okay the next thing I want to do is actually log in.

So what I've done, actually let me say something,

what I've done is I've installed,

I just have to come over here just to write this down,

a command line interface.

So how do you control Spell?

There are two ways to control Spell.

One is through their web browser interface

which I will show you at some point.

Another is through a command line interface,

meaning you can type in commands

on the command line on your computer

to interface with Spell and control it.

And every command is going to start with spell.

And now I'm going to say spell login.

And I'm going to put in my username,

and I'm going to put in my password, sillyunicorn.

And there it is, it says, Hello, danshiff!

So I know that I am logged in now.

And I can also do things like, say, spell whoami,

just to check like who did I log in as?

And you can see, okay, there's my username,

you can all email me now at daniel@thecodingtrain.com,

and you can see when my account was created, June 1st 2001,

and my last log in was 10 seconds ago

'cause I log in a lot apparently.

Alright so we have Spell working.

This is actually pretty easy.

Now I can do stuff.

So I could type spell,

anything that I can run on the command line,

for example I could type echo Choo! Choo!

Echo is a command

for the computer to echo back to me

whatever I type after echo.

So now if I want this command echo Choo! Choo!

to not run on my computer but to run on Spell,

all I have to do is say spell run echo Choo! Choo!

And here we go.

Now it's going to take longer.

Oh whoa, oh so first of all, ah,

this is very important,

I'm very glad that this happened,

because I meant to mention this.

Spell, as I was saying,

you need to know something about Git

which is version control software.

Spell is designed to work best when you run commands

from within a directory that is a Git repository.

At the moment I don't need to worry about that.

I'm just trying to say Choo! Choo!

So I'm just going to say continue anyway.

And then of course in a moment,

I'm going to run the commands from a Git repository.

So you could see it's casting spell number nine.

This is the ninth time

I've ever tried to run something on Spell.

A machine request is done, it's building,

it ran, it's that Choo! Choo!