PRODUCTION SCENARIO
A pharmaceutical company's infrastructure lead is budgeting accelerators to pretrain a 40-billion-parameter language model. The run should last about ten weeks at large batch sizes, with no custom operations in the training loop.
Which Google Cloud accelerator is the strongest fit for this workload?
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Show answer and explanation
Answer: Cloud TPUs, built for matrix-heavy models that train for weeks at large batch sizes
TPUs are Google's custom-designed chips for large matrix operations, and they suit exactly this profile: matrix-dominated models, no custom operations in the main training loop, runs measured in weeks or months, and large batch sizes. GPUs are the better answer when a model carries many custom operations, and Provisioned Throughput reserves inference throughput rather than training hardware.
Official Source: https://docs.cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/intro-to-tpu ↗