Boost your workstation

This page describes the workstation configuration parameters that provide support for boosting your workstations. Specifying a boost configuration temporarily allows your workstation to use a more powerful set of resources on demand, including VM type, GPUs, boot disk size, and nested virtualization. For example, a team may need a more powerful workstation with GPUs attached for certain applications. By specifying a boost configuration in the workstation config, workstations created as a part of this config can be started using the boost configuration when running applications requiring GPUs. In the API, these parameters are collectively referred to as the BoostConfig . BoostConfig .

Creating a boost configuration

To create a workstation config that includes a boost configuration, run the following gcloud CLI command:

gcloud beta workstations configs create WORKSTATION_CONFIG_ID 
\
        --cluster= WORKSTATION_CLUSTER_ID 
\
        --region= LOCATION 
\
        --project= PROJECT_ID 
\
        --boost-config=id= BOOST_CONFIG_ID 
,machine-type= MACHINE_TYPE 
,accelerators= ACCELERATORS 
,enable-nested-virtualization= ENABLE_NESTED_VIRTUALIZATION 
,boot-disk-size= BOOT_DISK_SIZE 
,pool-size= POOL_SIZE 

Replace the following:

• PROJECT_ID : the ID of the project that contains the workstation configuration.
• LOCATION : the location of the workstation cluster.
• WORKSTATION_CLUSTER_ID : the name workstation cluster that contains the workstation configuration.
• WORKSTATION_CONFIG_ID : the name of the workstation configuration to be created.
• BOOST_CONFIG_ID : The ID to be used for the boost configuration.
• MACHINE_TYPE : The type of machine that boosted VM instances will use (for example, e2-standard-4 ).
• ENABLE_NESTED_VIRTUALIZATION : Whether to enable nested virtualization.
• ACCELERATORS : A list of the type and count of accelerator cards attached to the boost instance.
• BOOT_DISK_SIZE : The size of the boot disk for the VM in gigabytes (GB).
• POOL_SIZE : The number of boost VMs that the system should keep idle.

See Boost Config API reference for more information about each parameter and their defaults.

Starting a boosted workstation

If the workstation config includes a boost configuration, when starting a workstation, users can choose to use a VM provisioned under the BoostConfig by passing the boost config id in the start request. If no boost config id is provided in the start request, the system will choose a VM from the pool provisioned under the default config.

To boost a specific workstation, run the following gcloud CLI command:

gcloud beta workstations start WORKSTATION_ID 
\
        --boost= BOOST_CONFIG_ID 

Replace the following:

• WORKSTATION_ID : the name workstation to start.
• BOOST_CONFIG_ID : The ID matching the boost configuration to boost up to.