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I haven't been at Google for years and never worked on TPUs, but off the top of my head: They control the system attached to the chips. That includes the kerne
by puzzle 8y ago
I haven't been at Google for years and never worked on TPUs, but off the top of my head:
They control the system attached to the chips. That includes the kernel and userland (glibc, libstdc++, etc.).
Very limited number of configurations (CPU, RAM, network, motherboard, any RDMA use) to qualify.
Monitoring, profiling, diagnostics, firmware, networking, security and automation follow the internal Google standards.
They can tune cooling to accommodate Google's motherboards and racks, whether it's air (v2) or liquid cooling (v3).
You can bet that they talk directly to the GCS backends through Stubby/gRPC, rather than sending HTTP traffic through the outside network and traversing GFEs.
Then there's all the other "mundane" stuff they don't need to worry about: packaging, manuals, warranties and user-facing RMA, multi-tenancy, etc.
- ori_b 8y agoAs far as I'm aware, they're still on OCP, which standardizes the bulk of this. Basically, this comes down to not being willing to be bothered with testing on diverse hardware. Which, fair enough, is a pain.
- btian 8y agoNot just hardware. TPU probably was only tested to work on one kernel version, one compiler, one version of GRPC etc. It probably takes a lot of effort to develop Windows driver, libraries, support for many kernel version etc.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ori_b 8y ago> It probably takes a lot of effort to develop Windows driver, libraries, support for many kernel version etc. That's easy to solve: "We only support Linux. Testing has only been done on kernel 4.13."
- kajecounterhack 8y agoGoogle isn't on OCP afaik. Their hardware layer is pretty custom. Maybe you were thinking of Facebook? Google's hardware layer is one thing; as btian mentioned, TPU also is deeply integrated with software infra e.g borg https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub43438 https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub43438
- puzzle 8y agoYears ago, Google announced they'd join OCP. I'd be surprised if even half the fleet made the transition, given how much mileage they like to get out of old hardware. Besides, for special toys like TPU pods it's not clear that they would value adhering to OCP standards above anything else.
- ori_b 8y agohttps://www.opencompute.org/membership/membership-organizational-directory https://www.opencompute.org/membership/membership-organizati...