Hi everyone,
I’m an undergraduate student currently working on mechanistic interpretability for Gemma-2 (specifically mapping SAEs).
I’ve run into a bit of a “catch-22” situation. The TPU Research Cloud (TRC) team was awesome enough to grant me a v5e/v6e cluster quota, but I’m totally stuck on the infrastructure side. Since I’m a student in Bangladesh with a $0 budget and no international credit card, I can’t pass the billing verification to actually spin up the TPU-VMs or the GCS buckets I need to store the activations.
I did apply for the official Google Cloud Research Credits program on April 8th, but the 4-6 week wait means my TPU quota is basically sitting idle while I wait for a decision.
Does anyone know if there’s a specific path for student researchers to verify a project without a card? Or is there a way to let the Research Credits team know that I already have an active TRC allocation that’s being wasted?
Any advice from people who have been in this spot would be hugely appreciated.
Thanks! Rafy