AI Hypercomputer Cluster Toolkit with Google Cloud

Ilias Katsardis, Senior Product Manager for AI infrastructure at Google Cloud, presented on the AI Hypercomputer Cluster Toolkit, addressing the complexities of deploying AI infrastructure on Google Cloud’s compute engine and GKE. He highlighted the challenges customers face when trying to quickly and efficiently create supercomputers in the cloud, including performance uncertainty, troubleshooting difficulties, and potential downtime. These issues often lead to increased time-to-market and costs, which Google Cloud aims to mitigate.

To tackle these problems, Google Cloud developed ClusterDirector, a foundation built upon purpose-built hardware, VMs, Managed Instance Groups, Kubernetes, and GKE. ClusterDirector includes capabilities such as a placement policy to ensure VMs are located in the same rack and switch for optimal performance. Sitting within ClusterDirector is Cluster Toolkit. Katsardis described Cluster Toolkit as the orchestrator for AI and HPC environments. It utilizes Terraform scripts and APIs to combine everything into a single deployment. Customers can define their AI infrastructure or HPC cluster in a blueprint, a concise configuration file that Cluster Toolkit uses to provision the environment.

The presentation introduced the Cluster Toolkit to simplify the deployment and management of AI infrastructure on Google Cloud, addressing the need for turnkey environments that adhere to best practices. While the underlying infrastructure relies on Terraform, the speaker emphasized that customers interact with a simplified blueprint, enabling easier auditing and faster deployment. The discussion also touched on future directions, including user interfaces to further streamline the process and the potential for managed services.