GPU boxes

A GPU box is a box with one NVIDIA GPU: the same Ubuntu machine, CLI, sync, ports and sessions as any box, with the NVIDIA driver, nvidia-smi and Docker's GPU runtime ready. GPU boxes are in beta: write to team@prized.ac to have your workspace added.

Sizes

• Billed from your prepaid balance only. Overage never covers a GPU box's awake hours, including ones still owed after it pauses or becomes a CPU size: a create, resume or resize onto one needs the balance to run your boxes, it included, for four hours, and at zero it pauses even where overage keeps your other boxes running. Asleep, its disk bills like any box's.
• A paid plan. A GPU box needs a plan whose first invoice is paid; the free credit or a top-up alone does not start one.
• One GPU box per workspace during the beta.
• Oregon only during the beta: GPU boxes run in US West (Oregon), us-west-2. A create, fork, resize or resume onto a GPU size in any other region answers 403 gpu_unavailable with reason region_unavailable, and a GPU box does not move regions. Pick Oregon under Region in the create form, or --region us-west-2 in the CLI.
• Disk only. GPU sizes have the disk in the table, not infinite storage.

Create

prized box new lab --size gpu-l4 --wait

Or pick GPU L4 or GPU L40S in the dashboard's create form. Then check the GPU:

prized ssh lab -- nvidia-smi

Containers reach it through Docker's GPU flag:

prized ssh lab -- docker run --rm --gpus all ubuntu nvidia-smi

Move a box onto a GPU

Fork it: a new GPU box from a copy of the disk, while the original keeps running.

prized fork lab --tier gpu-l40s

A box created as a Medium, Large or Extra Large can also change size in place, and back:

prized box resize lab gpu-l4

Nano through Small keep their memory when they pause, which a GPU machine cannot do, so they fork instead, and so does a box that started as one; the resize says so, or goes back to the size it came from. A GPU box changes size while it runs or sleeps, not while it is resuming. A box's first boot on a GPU installs the driver: a few minutes, with Docker restarted once, and prized box info shows driver installing until it is done.

Pause and resume

• A clean stop. Files survive; processes restart on resume, as on Medium and larger (Pause and resume).
• GPU work counts as use. A GPU kept busy holds off auto-pause like a busy CPU does.
• When no GPU is free, a resume waits about 10 minutes, billed as awake, and then the box goes back to sleep, with reconciler:wake_gave_up:capacity in its events. Resume it again later, or fork it, which can start on any free GPU in the region. A resize onto a GPU size bills the size it came from until the GPU is running, and goes back to that size if it cannot get one, or stays paused if that cannot start either. A resize off a GPU size bills the GPU until it is off, and one between GPU sizes bills the GPU it has until the new one is running.
• Back to a CPU size: resize a paused GPU box to Medium or larger and it resumes on the CPU size, without waiting for a GPU.

What a GPU box shows

prized box info has a gpu line (the model, utilization, memory in use), and the box's page in the dashboard shows the same under its live numbers.