1. Sign up for Google Cloud.

2. Set up a billing account.

3. Create a new project called “alpaca” and copy and paste the generated project ID.

   

4. Go to https://console.cloud.google.com/iam-admin/quotas and request a quota increase for compute.googleapis.com/nvidia_a100_80gb_gpus in us-east4. Note that this may take several hours, sometimes even a couple of days.

   

5. Install the gcloud command line tool.

6. Run gcloud auth login to login using your browser.

7. Run gcloud init . Select the project you created and the zone us-east4-c.

8. Run this to create an instance:

gcloud compute instances create \\
           alpaca \\
           --project=alpaca \\
           --zone=us-east4-c \\
           --machine-type=a2-ultragpu-4g \\
           --boot-disk-size=1024GB \\
           --image-project=deeplearning-platform-release \\
           --image-family=common-cu113 \\
           --maintenance-policy TERMINATE \\
           --restart-on-failure \\
           --scopes=default,storage-rw \\
           --metadata="install-nvidia-driver=True"

1. Wait a few minutes, and then log in to the new instance:

gcloud compute --project=alpaca ssh --zone=us-east4-c alpaca

Remember to switch it off when you’ve finished!

gcloud compute instances stop alpaca