Instructions

Following the instructions in https://research.google.com/colaboratory/marketplace.html. Here are a few detailed steps and notes:

  1. Set up GCP account, project, billing, etc.
  2. Launch a pre-configured VM from the marketplace image https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/colab-marketplace-image-public/colab
    • Remember to select the right project
    • Deployment name: e.g. colab-server-gpu
    • Zone: need to find an availability zone to have enough resource. I currently do it through trial and error. The one I found this time was us-west4-a.
    • Machine type: I used n1-highmem-8
    • GPUs: I chose NVIDIA T4 and number of GPUs is 1
  3. Go to https://colab.research.google.com/ and “connect with a custom GCE VM”.
    • Fill in project, zone and instance
    • Note that instance has a -vm suffix
  4. Verify that we can ssh into the VM:
    • Use the SSH button from the console
    • Run gcloud compute ssh colab-server-gpu-vm in local machine

Notes

Pros

  • The connection is stable. Without custom VM, the colab gets disconnected because of inactivity, even with with the paid Colab Pro version.
  • The pip libraries and cache files are persistent from one run to another.

Cons

  • It costs money..

Known Issues

  • google.colab.auth is not supported, see https://github.com/googlecolab/colabtools/issues/2533
    • This means we cannot easily access Google Drive or Google Cloud Storage.
    • [Workaround for GCS]: Use a key file
      1. Console > IAM & Admin > Service Accounts: CREATE SERVICE ACCOUNT
      2. 3 Dots > Manage Keys: ADD KEY
      3. Cloud Storage > Bucket > Select Bucket > PERMISSIONS: Grant the following role:
        • Storage Legacy Bucket Writer
        • Storage Object Creator
      4. In colab, upload the key, e.g. gcs-access-key.json. 
        from google.colab import files
uploaded = files.upload()
      5. Set the environment variable. 
        import os
os.environ["GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS"] = "gcs-access-key.json"
  • After stopping and restarting the VM, I cannot connect to colab to it any more.