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Cloud TPU VMs are generally available

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Re: Cloud TPU VMs are generally available

#11
post #9

Founder of the Cloud TPU program here. If you'd like to experiment with TPU VMs for free and are willing to share your work with the world somehow (e.g. via publications or open-source projects), you can apply to participate in the TPU Research Cloud (TRC) program here: https://sites.research.google/trc/

Congrats Zak!

Re: Cloud TPU VMs are generally available

#13
post #9

Founder of the Cloud TPU program here. If you'd like to experiment with TPU VMs for free and are willing to share your work with the world somehow (e.g. via publications or open-source projects), you can apply to participate in the TPU Research Cloud (TRC) program here: https://sites.research.google/trc/

Thanks Zak, already applied.

Just wondering does TPU VM support Vectorflow?

https://github.com/Netflix/vectorflow

Re: Cloud TPU VMs are generally available

#14
post #10
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I struggle to understand precisely what you mean by user experience and ‘often improved performance‘. Previously, there was no actual support for crucial features of the TPU related to data loading when using PyTorch, say. In turn, using a TPU over a GPU on that setup was frequently not worth it due to that exact issue. Your answer suggests it might be different now: are TF, Jax and PyTorch now on par in all stages?

In the previous Cloud TPU architecture, PyTorch and JAX users had to create a separate CPU VM for every remote TPU host and arrange for these CPU hosts to communicate indirectly with the TPU hosts via gRPC. This was cumbersome and made debugging difficult. With TPU VMs, none of this is necessary. You can SSH directly into each TPU host machine and install arbitrary software on a VM there to handle data loading and ot…

Here is an example post that shows how to train a PyTorch/XLA model with data pipeline reading from cloud storage.https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practitioner...

Re: Cloud TPU VMs are generally available

#15
post #9

Founder of the Cloud TPU program here. If you'd like to experiment with TPU VMs for free and are willing to share your work with the world somehow (e.g. via publications or open-source projects), you can apply to participate in the TPU Research Cloud (TRC) program here: https://sites.research.google/trc/

No post body was provided.

Re: Cloud TPU VMs are generally available

#16
post #5
post #2

TPU VMs are an incredible, incredible product. If you were put off by the previous TPU Node architecture, you should definitely come back and give this a shot. The dev/debug loop is just so much nicer now that the TPU is local to your VM. That said, the one thing I'm missing on these is orchestration. GKE supports TPU Nodes but it does not support TPU VMs. It seems to me like this is a must-have feature so I'm sure i…

Thanks for the very kind feedback! We've wanted to provide TPU VMs since the beginning of the Cloud TPU program, and I'm delighted that you're enjoying them. Many people across Google contributed to this launch. We're definitely working on GKE integration, and we intend to provide more support for orchestration over time since individual Cloud TPU workloads are getting bigger and bigger. We'd love to hear any more de…

Hi Zak, great achievement.

Xoogler, had connection with people working on TPU.

AFAIK, TPU support on GCP has been started in 2018? Or earlier? It's been 4 years to GA.

Rumors have it that the project has been incredibly difficult to get out due to Googler's poor cross-org collaboration support. It has been a sad story, another one in the list of things that Google could have been putting more resources and made available sooner to the public.

Re: Cloud TPU VMs are generally available

#18
post #9

Founder of the Cloud TPU program here. If you'd like to experiment with TPU VMs for free and are willing to share your work with the world somehow (e.g. via publications or open-source projects), you can apply to participate in the TPU Research Cloud (TRC) program here: https://sites.research.google/trc/

Hi Zak, this question is a little out of your scope, but perhaps you may know the answer: Do you know if/when Colab TPU runtimes are likely to be updated to support newer JAX functionality like pjit? (Or put another way: are Colab and Cloud TPU runtimes expected to be in-sync at all?) I'd written some model code that worked great on a TPU-VM and that I was excited to share on Colabs (which is likely far more accessible), but then I found out that Colabs simply don't support pjit (https://github.com/google/jax/issues/8300).

Other than that, really like TRC!

Re: Cloud TPU VMs are generally available

#20
post #9

Founder of the Cloud TPU program here. If you'd like to experiment with TPU VMs for free and are willing to share your work with the world somehow (e.g. via publications or open-source projects), you can apply to participate in the TPU Research Cloud (TRC) program here: https://sites.research.google/trc/

Hi Zak, this question is a little out of your scope, but perhaps you may know the answer: Do you know if/when Colab TPU runtimes are likely to be updated to support newer JAX functionality like pjit? (Or put another way: are Colab and Cloud TPU runtimes expected to be in-sync at all?) I'd written some model code that worked great on a TPU-VM and that I was excited to share on Colabs (which is likely far more accessib…

We love Colab and would love to upgrade the Colab TPU integration to support TPU VMs! No timeframe yet, but the right folks across JAX / Colab / Cloud TPU are very aware of this issue.
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