Google's Cloud TPU V2 and V3 Pods Are Now Publicly Available in Beta

Recently, Google announced that its second- and third-generation Cloud Tensor Processing Units (TPU) Pods are now publicly available in beta. These pods allow Google's scalable cloud-based supercomputers with up to 1,000 of its custom TPU to be publicly consumable, which enables Machine Learning (ML) researchers, engineers, and data scientists to speed up the time needed to train and deploy machine learning models. Google announced the first generation custom TPU’s at the Google I/O event in 2016, and started offering access to them as a cloud service for customers. The follow-up, the second-generation TPU, made its debut in 2017, and the liquid-cooled TPU v3 was presented at Google’s I/O keynote last year. Until the recent Google I/O 2019 a few weeks ago, the single TPU v2 and TPU v3 were publically available as individual devices in the Google Cloud. Now the TPU v2 and TPU v3 hardware come as robust interconnected systems called Cloud TPU Pods.