TPU regions and zones
Overview
The main differences between TPU types are price, performance, memory capacity, and zonal availability.
Google Cloud uses regions, subdivided into zones, to define the geographic
location of physical compute resources. For example, the
us-central1
region denotes a region near the geographic center of
the United States. When you create a TPU VM, you specify the zone in which you
want to create it. See the Compute Engine Global, regional, and zonal
resources document
for more information about regional and zonal resources.
You can create TPU configurations in the zones shown in the following table.
US
TPU type (v2) | TPU v2 cores | Available zones |
---|---|---|
v2-8 | 8 |
us-central1-b us-central1-c us-central1-f
|
v2-32 | 32 |
us-central1-a
|
v2-128 | 128 |
us-central1-a
|
v2-256 | 256 |
us-central1-a
|
v2-512 | 512 |
us-central1-a
|
TPU type (v3) | TPU v3 cores | Available zones |
v3-8 | 8 |
us-central1-a us-central1-b us-central1-f
|
TPU type (v4) | TPU v4 chips | Available zones |
All v4 configurations | varies by slice size |
us-central2-b |
TPU type (v5e) | TPU v5e chips | Available zones |
All v5litepod configurations | varies by slice size |
us-central1-a us-east5-a us-east5-b us-east5-c us-south1-a us-west1-c us-west4-a us-west4-b |
TPU type (v5p) | TPU v5p chips | Available zones |
All v5p configurations | varies by slice size |
us-east5-a |
Europe
TPU type (v2) | TPU v2 cores | Available zones |
---|---|---|
v2-8 | 8 |
europe-west4-a
|
v2-32 | 32 |
europe-west4-a
|
v2-128 | 128 |
europe-west4-a
|
v2-256 | 256 |
europe-west4-a
|
v2-512 | 512 |
europe-west4-a
|
TPU type (v3) | TPU v3 cores | Available zones |
v3-8 | 8 |
europe-west4-a
|
v3-32 | 32 |
europe-west4-a
|
v3-64 | 64 |
europe-west4-a
|
v3-128 | 128 |
europe-west4-a
|
v3-256 | 256 |
europe-west4-a
|
v3-512 | 512 |
europe-west4-a
|
v3-1024 | 1024 |
europe-west4-a
|
v3-2048 | 2048 |
europe-west4-a
|
TPU type (v5e) | TPU v5e chips | Available zones |
v5lite-1 | 1 |
europe-west4-b |
v5lite-4 | 4 |
europe-west4-b |
v5lite-8 | 8 |
europe-west4-b |
All v5litepod configurations | varies by slice size |
europe-west1-b europe-west4-a europe-west4-b |
TPU type (v5p) | TPU v5p chips | Available zones |
All v5p configurations | varies by slice size |
europe-west4-b
|
Asia Pacific
TPU type (v2) | TPU v2 cores | Available zones |
---|---|---|
v2-8 | 8 |
asia-east1-c
|
TPU type (v5e) | TPU v5e chips | Available zones |
All v5litepod configurations | varies by slice size |
asia-southeast1-b
|
TPU types with higher numbers of chips or cores are available only in limited quantities. TPU types with lower chip or core counts are more likely to be available.
Calculating price and performance tradeoffs
To decide which TPU type you want to use, you can do experiments using a Cloud TPU tutorial to train a model that is similar to your application.
Run the tutorial for 5 - 10% of the number of steps you will use to run the full
training on a v2-8
, or a v3-8
TPU type. The result
tells you how long it takes to run that number of steps for that model on each
TPU type.
Because performance on TPU types scales linearly, if you know how long it takes
to run a task on a v2-8
or v3-8
TPU type, you can
estimate how much you can reduce task time by running your model on a larger TPU
type with more chips or cores.
For example, if a v2-8
TPU type takes 60 minutes to 10,000 steps, a
v2-32
node should take approximately 15 minutes to perform the same
task.
When you know the approximate training time for your model on a few different TPU types, you can weigh the VM/TPU cost against training time to help you decide your best price and performance tradeoff.
To determine the difference in cost between the different TPU types for Cloud TPU and the associated Compute Engine VM, see the TPU pricing page.
Specifying the TPU type
Regardless of which framework you are using, you specify a v2
or v3
TPU type with the
accelerator-type
parameter when you
launch a TPU. For a TPU v4 or later, you
can specify the type and size using either AcceleratorType
or
AcceleratorConfig
. For more information, see TPU
versions. Example commands are
shown in Managing TPUs.
What's next
- To see pricing for TPUs in each region, see the Pricing page.
- Learn more about TPU architecture in the System Architecture page.
- See When to use TPUs to learn about the types of models that are well suited to Cloud TPU.