Results of a worldwide survey reveal that data professionals overwhelmingly use a personal computer or laptop as their computing platform most often for their data science projects. The next most used computing platform is a cloud computing platform and a deep learning workstation.
The practice of data science requires a variety of different tools and technologies to extract value from data. One piece of equipment that is commonly used is the computing platform. A computing platform is the environment in which a piece of software is executed.
In a worldwide machine learning and data science survey by Kaggle in late 2020 of over 20,000 data professionals, respondents were asked a variety of questions regarding the data science tools they typically use. For one of the questions, respondents were asked, “What type of computing platform do you use most often for your data science projects?” The results of that question appear in Figure 1. Nearly 80% of the respondents said that they use a person computer or laptop most often for their data science projects. Fourteen percent of data professionals use a cloud computing platform most often. The list of computing platforms and the percent of respondents who use them are:
- A personal computer or laptop (78%)
- A cloud computing platform (AWS, Azure, GCP, hosted notebooks, etc) (14%)
- A deep learning workstation (NVIDIA GTX, LambdaLabs, etc) (5%)
- Other (1%)
- None (2%)
Figure 1 also includes the results broken down by job title. While the personal computer/laptop remained the most popular computing platform, we see that the results varied significantly by job title; only 2/3rds of Machine Learning Engineers, Data Engineers and Data Scientists use a personal computer/laptop while nearly 90% of Statistician, Business Analysts and Data Analysts use a personal computer/laptop. That difference is primarily driven by the former group (~25%) utilizing a cloud computing platform at a higher rate than the latter group (10%). The biggest users of deep learning workstations are Machine Learning Engineers (13%, Research Scientists (13%) and Data Scientists (7%).
Size of Datasets
In this Big Data, deep learning world in which we live, you might think that data professionals lean heavily on the likes of cloud computing platforms and/or deep learning workstations. KDNuggets conducted a poll to determine the largest datasets analyzed by respondents. Results showed that most of the data professionals work with data in the gigabyte range (see Figure 2). The overall median response was between 11 and 100 GB, the size that can comfortably fit on one laptop. Given data professionals typically deal with relatively small datasets, it’s not surprising that most data professionals use a personal computer/laptop for their data science projects.
Summary
The top computing platform used most often by data professionals is a personal computer or laptop, followed by a cloud computing platform and a deep learning workstation.
Use of computing platforms varied over job titles, with Machine Learning Engineers, Data Scientists and Data Engineers use cloud computing platforms more often than other data professionals.
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