TPU v2

This document describes the architecture and supported configurations of Cloud TPU v2.

System architecture

Architectural details and performance characteristics of TPU v2 are available in A Domain Specific Supercomputer for Training Deep Neural Networks.

Configurations

A TPU v2 Pod is composed of 512 chips interconnected with reconfigurable high-speed links. To create a TPU v2 Pod slice, use the --accelerator-type flag in the TPU creation command (gcloud compute tpus tpu-vm). You specify the accelerator type by specifying the TPU version and the number of TPU cores. For example, for a single v2 TPU, use --accelerator-type=v2-8. For a v2 Pod slice with 128 TensorCores, use --accelerator-type=v2-128.

The following command shows how to create a v2 TPU Pod slice with 128 TensorCores:

  $ gcloud compute tpus tpu-vm create tpu-name \
    --zone=zone \
    --accelerator-type=v2-128 \
    --version=tpu-vm-tf-2.16.1-pjrt

For more information about managing TPUs, see Manage TPUs. For more information about the TPU system architecture Cloud TPU, see System architecture.

The following table lists the supported v2 TPU types:

TPU version	Support ends
v2-8	(End date not yet set)
v2-32	(End date not yet set)
v2-128	(End date not yet set)
v2-256	(End date not yet set)
v2-512	(End date not yet set)