GCP instructions give incompatible zone and instance type

[tdingman]

https://course.fast.ai/start_gcp.html#step-3-create-an-instance

Currently instructs us-west1-b for zone and n2d-highmem-8 for instance type.

However, enter gcloud compute machine-types list --filter n2d-highmem-8 and you won't see us-west1-b on the list of zones:

Note that I tried changing the zone to us-central1-a but got the following error:

ERROR: (gcloud.compute.instances.create) Could not fetch resource:
 - The resource 'projects/fastai-20200406/zones/us-central1-a/acceleratorTypes/nvidia-tesla-p100' was not found

[tdingman]

Another issue with the same setup documentation: n2d-highmem-8 doesn't offer GPUs.

Console error:

ERROR: (gcloud.compute.instances.create) Could not fetch resource:
 - [n2d-highmem-8, nvidia-tesla-p100] features are not compatible for creating instance.

GUI error:

[santhoshetty]

Hey, I had the same issue when I was trying to recreate the instance.

When I first created the instance, I followed the exact steps described in the link Start GCP Instance. I did a describe on this created instance by executing:

gcloud compute instances describe my-fastai-instance --zone us-west1-b

and my metadata dumped out reveals this:

So, it looks like the command to create the instance in the fastai link never created a n2d-highmem-8 machine type at all! It had created a n1-highmem-8!

So, I recommend that try a filter on machine type n1-highmem-8 and then use those zones which have the required GPU. I am currently executing this.

[santhoshetty]

I executed using n1-highmem-8 and I can confirm that this works 100%