We had to solve this problem for our TPU management system: <a href="https://www.tensorfork.com/tpus" rel="nofollow">https://www.tensorfork.com/tpus</a><p>The most sensible naming scheme for us was to distinguish them by index. But there were two important differences: TPUs have many sizes, which means some are larger than others; if you're using a v3-256, you're very likely the only researcher doing so. They are also distinguished by type; v3 is more powerful than v2. Finally, they are region-based; the less powerful v2's are in the US, whereas the v3 fleet is mainly EU based.<p>That led to the convention of tpu-v3-8-euw4a-1, tpu-v2-256-usc1a-0, and so on.<p>The "tpu-" prefix might seem redundant, but I find it's helpful in conversation. That's a personal preference though, and if I had to do it again I'd probably drop the tpu- prefix entirely.<p>I found this scheme was horrible for VMs though. TPUs are often used for specific training runs, and the scheme above is easily added to bash files / config scripts. But for VMs, you're often SSH'ing into them all the time.<p>Ultimately we started naming the VMs after the researchers who originally needed them. Our current primary training box is song.tensorfork.com, named after researcher songpeng who it was created for. So the SSH scheme was pleasant: song@song.tensorfork.com for him, shawn@song.tnesorfork.com for me, arfa@, aydao@, etc.<p>When arfa neded a VM, I simply named it arfa.<p>All other more complicated naming schemes failed with time. No one (including me) could remember long VM names, let alone ones with numbers in them.<p>The other scheme that persisted was to use anime characters, as emersion mentioned. Tensorfork itself runs off of vegeta, which is my personal Hetzner server. "goku" was one of our primary workhorses at one point, due to its large VM size.<p>Our final two VMs are named "test" and "nuck", which also seem to work quite well (much to my surprise). "Is test down?" is almost completely unambiguous. And it's easy to remember which one is which: "nuck" is in Canada, so therefore "test" is the one in europe.<p>A pattern emerges here: most of our VM names are <i>short, four-letter identifiers</i>: arfa, song, test, nuck, goku, with vegeta being the standout. All other conventions failed with time.