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Comment by usmannk | Hacker News Reader

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 it's on the roadmap.

If anyone from the team is here, do you have updates on this? And if anyone reading this has orchestration techniques they use and recommend for TPU VMs, please let me know what they are!

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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 detailed feedback you might have.

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.

I started pitching the Cloud TPU program in 2016. Many, many people have contributed since then to build the products that are available today.

Google is a large and complicated place, but we're getting closer to providing the magical interactive supercomputing experience we've wanted for a long time.

The deep learning landscape is evolving very rapidly, and there is a lot of interest in scaling up further, so the next few years will be exciting.

Curious what is the difficulty with GKE integration? From afar, it seems like the flavor of VM shouldn’t impact ability to run K8s.

The GKE team probably has other priorities.

Question was around what makes these instance types harder to support than any other.

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