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.