Google Cloud Platform Blog: Cloud TPU now offers preemptible pricing and global availability

Google Cloud Platform Blog

Product updates, customer stories, and tips and tricks on Google Cloud Platform

Cloud TPU now offers preemptible pricing and global availability

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

By Brennan Saeta, TensorFlow Tech Lead for Cloud TPUsTranslatePhotosSearchAssistantGmailCloud TPUsQuickstart

One Cloud TPU (v2-8) can deliver up to 180 teraflops and includes 64 GB of high-bandwidth memory. The colorful cables link multiple TPU devices together over a custom 2-D mesh network to form Cloud TPU Pods. These accelerators are programmed via TensorFlow and are widely available today on Google Cloud Platform.

Benchmarking Cloud TPU performance-per-dollarDAWNBenchImageNet Training CostAmoebaNetResNet-50ImageNet Training Timesix times fasterhereCloud TPU ResNet-50 implementationYou can now train ResNet-50 on ImageNet from scratch for just $7.50.Preemptible VMssaving and restoring from checkpoints

Select Open-Source Reference Models	Normal training cost (TF 1.8)	Preemptible training cost (TF 1.8)
ResNet-50 (with optimizations from fast.ai): Image classification	~$25	~$7.50
ResNet-50 (original implementation): Image classification	~$59	~$18
AmoebaNet: Image classification (model architecture evolved from scratch on TPUs to maximize accuracy)	~$49	~$15
RetinaNet: Object detection	~$40	~$12
Transformer: Neural machine translation	~$41	~$13
ASR Transformer: Speech recognition (transcribe speech to text)	~$86	~$27

Start using Cloud TPUs todayecently-improved preemptible pricingCloud TPU Quickstartopen source reference modelsfree trialEffective machine learning with Cloud TPUsTraining Performance: A user’s guide to converge faster.