--- tags: Stories --- Title: Researchers embrace virtual machines on the UCloud platform A new and improved experience for virtual machines has been launched on the #UCloud platform Background: From February UCloud offers a new and improved user experience for virtual machines (Ubuntu VMs). A VM can now be launced within seconds instead of days, because the creation process is now fully automated. Currently UCloud offers two kinds of VMs, uc-general and uc-t4 for CPU and GPU computing respectively. The team behind UCloud's VMs are planning to expand the offer of VMs with more types of GPU enabled machines and different software. User story: As a researcher from the humanities access to cloud GPUs (Graphical Processing Units) is extremely important to be able to train and use neural langauge models. In machine learning, model training consists of simple matrix calculations, and a GPU can speed up this process significantly by distributing the training process on many specialized GPU cores that use fewer resources. With the automation of VMs in UCloud, I can access a GPU for machie learning in a matter of seconds, says Kristoffer Nielbo from Aarhus University that works on media monitoring tools for natural language.