The 192 core Google Cloud server is likely running at a fairly low frequency for power efficiency. So 5 days on it might be comparable to 1 or 2 months on a 16 core Ryzen 5950X that you can rent at hetzner.com/sb for around $100 a month. You can alternatively get an Epyc 7502P there (32 cores) for around the same price. I don't know how the speed would compare.
I have been surprised that the Boggle code runs about 4x slower on the GCP machine than on my M2 MacBook. I don’t have enough experience running CPU- and RAM-intensive cloud jobs to know whether this is normal.
Similar experience at DigitalOcean where, in 2023, I rented a VPS with dedicated cores to compute on some decent-sized dataset and it turned out to be slower than the 2012 laptop CPU that I use as my main server! That laptop has an i7-3630qm iirc, not sure what DO claimed they give you but it was slower
The storage i/o speeds were also crap (quoting myself here from the notes I made at the time) compared to what I got soon after when I bought a 70€ TLC SSD as upgrade for the laptop-server. They claim it runs on SSDs but, if it does, they're the world's cheapest bulk data SSDs or they have a bottleneck in ferrying data between the SAN and the VPS host, even for sequential r/w (that it has higher iops latency, I could understand)
At work, we sometimes use AWS GPUs for password cracking (we do security audits and sometimes find hashes). The GPUs that employees have just to play some games are faster than these and cost a lot less to operate, but we can't put customer data on private systems
For occasional problems that can be parallelised, sure, rent a hundred temporary systems at a cloud farm for two days; but in general I just can't recommend it to anyone. It costs an arm and a leg compared to cheaper providers or buying hardware yourself (if you're into being the sysadmin). The "we have a fleet of systems on stand-by for you" (so you can scale on demand) is a big premium that most seem to be unaware of that they're paying implicitly
You can possibly do a lot better with dedicated servers (bare iron) than VPS. Particularly, "dedicated core" VPS are actually dedicated threads, so you get one real core per two vcores.
