DLI Course - Usage Limit

Community Information Forum Feedback
1

Hi everyone,
I had recently enrolled in the "Exploring Adversarial Machine learning " course but I am already receiving the a Usage Limit error (I am waiting for a reply from support).
After spending some time working through the initial module, I was surprised to receive that message error when trying to restart the Jupyter notebooks as there was no mention anywhere of usage caps anywhere or at least it was not communicated effectively to students. This is frustrating for a few reasons:

  1. As said, I did not find any mention of any usage caps anywhere. My suggestion would be to make this information very clear from the start and not to be hidden somewhere. If there actually was no mention of any usage limit though there should be no usage limits.
  2. In the first video of the course there is no mention on how to properly manage the time allotted for the Jupyter notebooks nor any indication of the amount left. This give students no real tool in properly distributing learning efforts thus resulting in an efficient use of time and in the need of requesting several increase of the usage limits thus wasting students’ and NVIDIA’s time for something it could have been avoided

Please also consider these should be treated as constructive feedback ideas in order to render the whole learning experience a better journey for both students and also NVIDIA.
I am looking forward from your feedback and how to proceed from there:

  • will my usage cap be reset?
  • what happens if I use the remaning time and I need an extension? This is my first course on the subject and I might need some time to get through everything
  • how can I avoid burning usage limit? Since I cannot start the lab now, was there a “Stop” option to stop the labs?

Apologies for the very long messages and thanks in advance for your patience (and very informative courses)!

Looking forward to your feedback!
PS: If there is a more suitable place where I should have posted this please feel free to move the conversation elsewhere

2

Hello,

Welcome to the forums!
I don’t work for the DLI goup, but will make sure to pass your comments on to team.

I have added eight hours to your account.
Let me know if you have any issues accessing the course.

Best,
Tom

3

Thanks a lot! Do you know if I will be able to start/stop the python notebooks to avoid usage consumption? Also, if I happen to use the remaining hours, do you think I could attempt to extend again? Just want to make sure to finish the course…:) Thanks again!

4

@tdahlin,

To comment on this.

5

Hello,

  1. The usage cap is indicated upon launching a lab. When the “Launch” button shows up, it displays two limits: The first is the amount of time that the particular lab will run for (this is limited to prevent users from starting a lab and never shutting it down); the second is the total amount of lab time available for the course. We’re aware that this can be unclear and are hoping to have a more clear indicator for this soon.
    image

  2. As mentioned above, we’re looking into ways to make it more clear before a student opens a lab that there is a maximum time limit, but we have not had the opportunity to implement this yet.

As for your remaining questions:

  1. Your usage cap can be increased in increments of the course length, but we only allow a maximum amount of lab time extensions because of students’ tendencies to use our labs for non-course material.
  2. If you need an extra extension, you can contact dli-help@nvidia.com. I try to keep on top of the support requests that go through this email address, but sometimes it takes me a while to get back to users as I’m the only one who takes care of support requests, and I’m supposed to be primarily an engineer.
  3. As mentioned above, you can avoid burning the usage limit by pressing the “Stop” button when you’ve finished with a module. If you need to save your progress, you can download the necessary files from the lab.

I hope this answers all your questions!