Skip to main content

​
Rental Type Overview

We currently offer two rental types:

​
On-Demand (High Priority)

  • Fixed price set by the host
  • Runs as long as you want
  • Cannot be interrupted
  • More expensive but reliable

​
Interruptible (Low Priority)

  • You set a bid price
  • Can be stopped by higher bids
  • Saves 50-80% on costs
  • Good for fault-tolerant workloads

​
How do interruptible instances compare to AWS Spot?

Similarities:
  • Both can be interrupted
  • Both offer significant savings
Differences:
  • Vast.ai uses direct bidding (you control your bid price)
  • AWS uses market pricing
  • No 24-hour limit like GCE preemptible instances
  • Vast.ai instances can run indefinitely if not outbid

​
What happens when my interruptible instance loses the bid?

Your instance is stopped (killing running processes). Important considerations:
  • Save work frequently to disk
  • Use cloud storage for backups
  • Instance may wait long to resume
  • Implement checkpointing for long jobs
When using interruptible instances, always design your workload to handle interruptions gracefully.

​
DLPerf Scoring

​
What is DLPerf?

DLPerf (Deep Learning Performance) is our scoring function that estimates performance for typical deep learning tasks. It predicts iterations/second for common tasks like training ResNet50 CNNs. Example scores:
  • V100: ~21 DLPerf
  • 2080 Ti: ~14 DLPerf
  • 1080 Ti: ~10 DLPerf
A V100 (21) is roughly 2x faster than a 1080 Ti (10) for typical deep learning.

​
Is DLPerf accurate for my workload?

DLPerf is optimized for common deep learning tasks:
  • ✅ CNN training (ResNet, VGG, etc.)
  • ✅ Transformer models
  • ✅ Standard computer vision
  • ⚠️ Less accurate for unusual compute patterns
  • ⚠️ Not optimized for non-ML workloads
For specialized workloads, benchmark on different GPUs yourself. While not perfect, DLPerf is more useful than raw TFLOPS for most ML tasks.
⌘I