This optimizes the use of the GPU hardware and it can serve more than one user, reducing costs. A basic level of familiarity with the core concepts in Kubernetes and in GPU Acceleration will be useful to the reader of this article. We first look more closely at pods in Kubernetes and how they relate to a GPU. A pod is the unit of deployment, at the lowest level, in Kubernetes. A pod can have one or more containers within it. The lifetime of the containers within a pod tend to be about the same, although one container may start before the others, as the "init" container. You can deploy higher-level objects like Kubernetes services and deployments that have many pods in them. We focus on pods and their use of GPUs in this article. Given access rights to a Tanzu Kubernetes cluster (TKC) running on the VMware vSphere with Tanzu environment (i.e. a set of host servers running the ESXi hypervisor, managed by VMware vCenter), a user can issue the command:

VMware vSphere with Tanzu provides users with the ability to easily construct a Kubernetes cluster on demand for model development/test or deployment work in machine learning applications. These on-demand clusters are called Tanzu Kubernetes clusters (TKC) and their participating nodes, just like VMs, can be sized as required using a YAML specification. In a TKC running on vSphere with Tanzu, each Kubernetes node is implemented as a virtual machine. Kubernetes pods are scheduled onto these nodes or VMs by the Kubernetes scheduler running in the Control Plane VMs in that cluster. To accelerate machine learning training or inference code, one or more of these pods require a GPU or virtual GPU (vGPU) to be associated with them.