Appendix C. Using Google Cloud TPUs

 

This chapter covers

  • Setting up a Cloud TPU project.
  • Running a Cloud TPU instance and connecting it to Google Colab (or Jupyter Notebook)

C.1 Setting up a Cloud TPU project

You must set up a Google Cloud account and prepare a toolset for working with Cloud TPUs.

Be careful

using Cloud TPUs brings you some expenses, as the Google Cloud Free Tier credits do not cover GPU and TPU costs. The current TPU costs are nearly $4.50 per hour for TPU v2-8, nearly $8 per hour for TPU v3-8, and approximately $13 per hour for TPU v4-8, depending on the region. You may find the actual pricing here: https://cloud.google.com/tpu/pricing. You may also obtain credits for using Google Cloud through various initiatives for startups (https://cloud.google.com/startup), education (https://edu.google.com/intl/ALL_us/programs/credits/), and research (https://cloud.google.com/edu/researchers and https://sites.research.google/trc/about/).

Do the following steps:

C.2 Running a Cloud TPU instance and connecting it to Google Colab

C.2.1 Running and deleting a Cloud TPU node

C.2.2 Preparing a Cloud TPU node

C.2.3 Connecting to a Cloud TPU node from a Colab notebook

C.2.4 Resources