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Show HN: gpudeploy.com – "Airbnb" for GPUs
Hi HN,
YC w24 company here. We just pivoted from drone delivery to build gpudeploy.com, a website that routes on-demand traffic for GPU instances to idle compute resources.
The experience is similar to lambda labs, which we’ve really enjoyed for training our robotics models, but their GPUs are never available for on-demand. We are also trying to make it more no-nonsense (no hidden fees, no H100 behind “contact sales”, etc.).
The tech to make this work is actually kind of nifty, we may do an in-depth HN post on that soon.
Right now, we have H100s, a few RTX 4090s and a GTX 1080 Ti online. Feel free to try it out!
Also, if you’ve got compute sitting around (a GPU cluster, a crypto mining operation or just a GPU) or if you’re an AI company with idle compute (hopefully not in a Stability AI way) and want to see some ROI, it’s very simple and flexible to hook it up to our site and you’ll maybe get a few researchers using your compute.
Nice rest of the week!
- malfist 2y agoI'm curious how a business pivots from drone delivery to GPU Airbnb?
- exe34 2y agoI got it from the line about how they trained their robot models - think of Amazon pivoting to aws, the substrate becomes the commodity. Unless you're asking if it makes sense, or what went wrong? Then I don't know. I imagine startups that survive usually pivot from something else?
- MikeTheGreat 2y agoI've never run a start-up (successful or otherwise :) ) but I've also heard that being able to pivot can be really useful - Flickr is often cited as an example. Also, "GPU on demand" sounds _a_lot_ easier than "drone-based delivery". Between Seti@Home/Folding@Home/etc, various grid-computing/clustering/orchestration stacks that already exist, etc it seems reasonably doable to implement in a year or so. "drone-based delivery" sounds capital-intensive, sounds like you'll need to spend a lot of time building a professional network of business people who might use the service (so there's a 'cultural friction' between techie founders and business folks, potentially), plus the ever-looming threat of Amazon/etc figuring this out first. tl;dr: I agree it's weird pivot, and good on the founders for being able to make the change! :)
- jayyhu 2y agoTo add to "capital-intensive": the regulatory framework right now (in the US) for drone delivery is uncertain at best. While most of the rules & regs to enable drone delivery is already finalized & published, a few very important ones (such as BVLOS - beyond visual line-of-sight) have yet been finalized, and thus need one-off waivers from the FAA to allow. And getting those one-off waivers is what eats a lot of time & money.
- nicowaltz 2y agoWhile most people think it's cool and some think it's scary, drone delivery is ultimately something that people (that is: companies with money) don't need. Turns out, using drones to deliver is also not that competitive either. Delivery vans are very cost-efficient, and for food delivery / on-demand delivery, drones are not able to carry most orders. So it's not even the regulatory pains that make this difficult, which are unbearable in their own right. It was a lot of fun to work on and we would have definitely stuck with it if there was any interest. There was none, so we had to admit that to ourselves. This is a hard pivot, but it's been very stimulating to work on.
- qeternity 2y agoBtw thanks for this honest insight. When I read the bit about your pivot, I sort of rolled my eyes. But this is a really nice, sober reflection that actually builds credibility with people like me who might make snap judgements at first. I hope you guys find traction.
- kristopolous 2y agoThey're chasing money. It's a tactic
- callalex 2y agoTheir parents are good friends of someone else’s parents.
- a2128 2y agoWhat's so unique about this compared to just using RunPod?
- yeldarb 2y agoLove the concept. I've used vast.ai (similar "Airbnb for GPUs" pitch) for years to spin up cheap test machines with GPUs you can't really find in the cloud (and especially consumer-grade GPUs like 4090s). Any insight into how this is different/better?
- ganoushoreilly 2y agoIm also interested in what the differing factor is. Would also like to see more documentation for onboarding rather than just "Ubuntu and root available".
- icelancer 2y agovast you have to choose specific machines. gpudeploy routes to whatever resources are available. vast has a lot of bad machines with terrible PCIe lanes and architecture you have to learn the hard way. Someone on HN wrote a script to run a test docker image on every machine and auto-tagged the machines' quality using their API, which is what I'd do if I was going to use vast seriously for compute.
- polygot 2y agoDo you have a link to that thread/Docker image? I would be very interested using it
- icelancer 2y agoI don't, sorry. I would love to use it as well, I should've bookmarked it! Also, I'm not sure the person opensourced it.
- lelanthran 2y ago>> Im also interested in what the differing factor is. > vast has a lot of bad machines with terrible PCIe lanes and architecture you have to learn the hard way. Wouldn't gpudeploy have exactly the same problem? How is it mitigated with gpudeploy?
- idiotsecant 2y agoThis is an interesting idea but it would be cool if it were more granular, like I pay while my payload is executing only, and an API abstracts away which GPUs I'm running on, the execution environment, etc and just let's me push in code and get out data when it's done. Maybe that's what this is, not sure. I hit an account sign up before I could figure it out.
- dbish 2y agoI think products like this have to evolve into pay by the hour otherwise you find alternatives that have it.
- spxneo 2y agodoesn't seem all that cheap compared to whats available
- bllchmbrs 2y agoFor those that wants prices checkout: https://gpumonger.com/ https://gpumonger.com/ This seems much more in depth, and a true service, but for those that just want to compare prices check out gpumonger.
- latchkey 2y agoThere is no 'contact us' page, which is a little concerning.
- Ocha 2y agoThey are not providing actual service - just price comparisons across different providers. Why is contact us page missing a concern here?
- latchkey 2y agoI'm a provider, I'd like to list my service. How do I do that? Since there is nothing obvious, then how do you know the providers they list are a valid representation of what is out there? Maybe there are other providers who don't want to pay to be listed? But how do you even pay?
- mike_d 2y agoThey list over 40 vendors. If you want to be listed, maybe get bigger?
- LoganDark 2y agoWho says they're even looking? Being able to contact them would tell you right away whether they simply overlooked you or whether you don't yet meet some criteria (which they might actually tell you).
- trogdor 2y agoI have read many of your comments on GPU-related posts. Occasionally, when I see your comments, I visit your website to see if I can learn anything about your business beyond what you are posting on HN. To this day, hotaisle.xyz contains nothing but a logo. I don’t get it. How can you expect a website to list your service when your own service’s website contains zero information? Why would you pay to list your service, when there is no information available about the service you provide? Am I looking in the wrong place? So confused…
- overgard 2y agoPretty neat, but is there any Windows or MacOS support planned? I wouldn't mind renting out my GPU when it's idle, but I don't really want to go through the process of dual booting etc.
- bongodongobob 2y agoWhat are you doing GPUs that requires Windows or Mac support?
- zephyrthenoble 2y agoVideo games
- otterley 2y agoHave you looked at Nvidia GeForce NOW? It's like $10/mo for a pretty decent streaming gaming rig. I'm very happy with it - I don't have to deal with Windows and can play AAA games on my Macbook Pro at 60Hz (1080p).
- erhaetherth 2y ago> on my Macbook Pro at 60Hz (1080p). I think you just answered yourself. Some of us like to play games at 4K at 80Hz+, with no subscription fees, no internet bandwidth requirements, no added latency, and ability to mod.
- hhh 2y agoYeah, but that has nothing to do with the context of the question. Someone is specifically asking about accessing a GPU over the internet for video games.
- freedomben 2y agoNowadays it's rare that a Windows-only game that I want to run doesn't run flawlessly on my Linux machine (through Proton/Wine). I wouldn't recommend going outside of Steam though unless you're willing to do some troubleshooting.
- krasin 2y agoRelated: https://vast.ai https://vast.ai is good and cheap. Just don't put any sensitive data on these GPU machines. I've been a happy user of vast.ai for some time now.
- EE84M3i 2y agoWhat's the security story here?
- htrp 2y agoprobably very basic... so don't run it on anything that has your own data on it (if you're an AI startup, definitely don't run it on your research cluster).
- Traubenfuchs 2y ago> definitely don't run it on your research cluster ...what‘s the threat, actually? GPU time sellers stealing your secret sauce?
- lolinder 2y agoI think they mean don't lease out your research team's GPUs and allow random people to run untrusted code on your cluster, lest they figure out a way to break out of any sandboxing the software has in place and get loose in your network. The company's current answer to that concern is "everything runs inside Docker, configured with security best-practices", which is less than inspiring. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40261591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40261591
- remram 2y agoWhat's preventing GPU providers from sending wrong results instead of actually running the computation? For example, send the last computed result? Is this something that the renter has to handle by adding their own checks? In addition to the problem of the renter crashing your machine or reading your password through DMA, of course.
- latchkey 2y agoWhat incentive would a GPU provider have to spend time figuring out what result to send for some custom application?
- epa 2y agoDDoSaaS
- callalex 2y agoBack in my day we cooperated to advance medicine and science with folding@home. How times change. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home
- cntrmmbrpsswrd 2y agoAnd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home. I suppose this is different, since I'd wager it'll end up being used primarily by for-profit projects.
- agumonkey 2y agoIt's strange how society psychology changes so much. SETI and Folding were huge in scale but not in hype.
- EduardoBautista 2y agofolding@home was used in the “console wars” to justify one’s choice of the PS3 over the Xbox 360. Was the cell processor in the PS3 really that efficient for this purpose?
- TkTech 2y agoIt was a fairly unique architecture that had some pros and cons. In reality what made it a winner was the steep subsidy by Sony (units were sold at a loss, making the assumption you would buy a few games) and the availability (later removed) of an official Linux distribution.
- luigi23 2y agovery few cared about linux. it was mostly hd-dvd (later dvd) vs blu-ray.
- kuschku 2y agoIt was basically an all-purpose vector computing monster focused on SIMD. You could use it for physics simulations, animations, tesselation, etc. Basically everything you'd use a compute shader for nowadays. That's why emulators need AVX512 support to match the PS3. It was incredibly powerful. Obviously, in that era's single-threaded world no engine could make use of that functionality and few knew how to program for it. It was ahead of its time, by quite a while.
- mattxxx 2y agoDoesn't this just raise the price of gpu's, and further encourage people to hoard them?
- lreeves 2y agoIt'd be nice if there was any documentation on how the sharing side of things worked pre-account creation. Is it a VM image you distribute? Docker container?
- lschneider 2y agoThere's a post how to list your GPU here: https://blog.gpudeploy.com/earn-passive-income-renting-out-your-gpu/ https://blog.gpudeploy.com/earn-passive-income-renting-out-y...
- nirvanatikku 2y agoGreat idea and wishing you the best of luck! Dropping a note that I've found https://akash.network/ https://akash.network/ ~ https://akash.network/gpus/ https://akash.network/gpus/ to be impressive, as typically with crypto projects it's all scams, however in this instance there's demand and legit usage. https://stats.akash.network/ https://stats.akash.network/ Something to consider!
- lordofgibbons 2y agoI was excited to see their offering, but unfortunately they don't take fiat - only some specific cryptos.
- nirvanatikku 2y agoFiat proxied through USDC - a stablecoin offered by [Circle](https://www.circle.com/en/usdc https://www.circle.com/en/usdc).
- barbarr 2y agoI feel they could onboard so many more users by having a fiat frontend that doesn't refer to blockchain. But maybe they're targeting crypto natives so users don't get shocked by price variability etc.
- david_shi 2y agoyou can use akash gpu's on brev.dev
- densh 2y agoAre you planning on letting hobbyists rent their single machine with multiple GPUs?
- thih9 2y ago> or if you’re an AI company with idle compute (hopefully not in a Stability AI way) What does that mean? I’m likely missing some context, could anyone explain?
- burkaman 2y agoI think Stability is not doing well and ran out of money to pay for all their compute, so they should probably use some Airbnb guests right now.
- omneity 2y agoMy understanding is that Stability was renting GPUs from AWS rather than buying them[0]. So they have no capacity per se. [0]: https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/03/stability_ai_bills/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/03/stability_ai_bills/
- latchkey 2y agoInteresting, these companies are springing up left and right. Software solutions to a hardware problem. It looks like most of the available compute is allocated, so they are going to have to get a bunch more providers onboarded. I wonder why y-combinator is stuffing their investments with multiples of these similar companies... https://www.shadeform.ai/ https://www.shadeform.ai/ is another one. A few quick comments: Reading the source of their install script: https://gpudeploy-public.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/join_cluster.sh https://gpudeploy-public.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/join_clu... It doesn't start off with set -e, which could result in an incomplete install, yet appear to finish. It also installs some binary "instance-server"... who knows what it does... would you trust this on your server on your network? It is nvidia specific... sadly, don't expect AMD gpus anytime soon. Feels like a MVP, let's see how this grows over time.
- dheera 2y agoIs there any way to monitor for sales of hardware if/when any of these companies dies so that I can get 1xH100 for personal use at a deep discount?
- latchkey 2y agoEbay?
- dheera 2y agoIs that where they really go? I feel like buying anything for several thousand dollars on Ebay is sketch. What if they ship me an empty box?
- latchkey 2y agoBack in my crypto asic mining days, I'd hear stories of people receiving boxes of cement blocks. Looks like you can get a MI210 on ebay for $6500, with 30 day warranty. heh. Oh, there are a bunch of H100's there...
- 2y ago
- bigcat12345678 2y agoWe have a similar product at https://llm.sxwl.ai/ModelRepository https://llm.sxwl.ai/ModelRepository, also routing container workloads to GPU clusters (managed by Kubernetes). The difference is that ours sell GPU compute hours, not machines.
- scottfits 2y agoI have a cluster on RunPod and it's great, but there's definitely some opportunity in the space, for example if you can focus on transparency (utilization rates, more info about end user and their purpose, reporting) that would be helpful. I think RunPod and Vast have most the market share but t's still early to the game
- HallsOfArden 2y ago[flagged]
- hallsofarden521 2y ago[flagged]
- animex 2y agoI wonder if I could get strangers to heat my home with GPUs in the winter...
- remram 2y agoYes: https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/31/qarnot-raises-6-5-million-for-its-computer-servers-that-heat-buildings/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/31/qarnot-raises-6-5-million-... > French startup Qarnot (...) manufactures heaters and boilers with a special trick — they pack computers as computers tend to generate a lot of heat. Qarnot then lets companies leverage that computing power by running tasks on those unusual servers.
- nicowaltz 2y agoYes, great use-case.
- modeless 2y agoHow are you different from vast.ai? What's your payout rate?
- ShamelessC 2y ago[flagged]
- oefrha 2y agoI don’t get “final rate is usually lower”. Why is it lower, and by how much? And since it’s “usually”, what about the unusual case? Equal to the sticker price, or higher? But since you use “<” neither should happen? I would expect an exact price tag for a “no-nonsense” pricing scheme. Right now it’s just confusing.
- nicowaltz 2y agoThanks for the input, you're right, maybe a fixed price is better. The idea currently is that the quoted price is an upper limit on the rate you pay and the final rate depends on what the GPU provider inputs, which will normally result in a lower rate than the upper bound. At the moment we have upper bounds if you want to be included in on-demand input, and also depending on the service you provide (security, network etc.). We determine pricing with partners 1-on-1 a the moment.
- latchkey 2y agoI would focus on offering a pricing model that entices people to want to pay. I've found that usually this involves something extremely simple and easy to understand, with clear up front numbers.
- oefrha 2y agoThanks for the answer, probably a good idea to include some version of this in the footnote.
- CtrlAltDelete51 2y agoWhat kind of utilization percentages do you expect to be able to provide? Do you have any existing usage/ROI data?
- nicowaltz 2y agoJust launched but will put a panel on the landing page for that, once the data comes in.
- CtrlAltDelete51 2y agoSide note: you contact form doesn’t work - do you have an email I send some questions over to?
- nicowaltz 2y agoSure, nico@gpudeploy.com
- rushingcreek 2y agoThis is really great! I hope you succeed. At Phind, we’re customers of Voltage Park and SF Compute for something similar. Let me know if you’d like to chat!
- moneywoes 2y agowhat is a Stability AI way?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lordofgibbons 2y agoHello, I'm currently in the market for an on-demand GPU host so this is perfect timing. What kind of privacy can I expect from this service?
- KeplerBoy 2y agoMake sure your users can run profiling tools! Specifically Nsight Compute needs containers with some elevated privileges. That would get you an easy win over vast.ai .
- florid 2y ago[dead]
- azinman2 2y agoSeems like you have to rent for specific dates… that doesn’t feel very on-demand to me. It also means you have to know how much time you need. I’d love to be able to run a job with a remote gpu as if it were local, spinning up instances as needed. Then if things crash and I need some hours to figure it out, let me downsize it all.
- CaptainFever 2y agoWhat about privacy? Can I run sensitive data on these strangers' GPUs?
- cdchn 2y agoIf I got an RTX 4090 sitting around idle, how much can I get for it?
- keefle 2y agoNeat Idea! I was wondering, are there any security guarantees for the providers? Assume I have a small GPU cluster at home, if I rent out my GPUs, what sort of access should I accept the renters to have? Only GPU kernels would be sent to machine? Or will they have a limited permission user access on my cluster? Also instead of having the operatos openning ports in their routers, were there any considers of adding them to a private network for a more seamless experience? (Nebula/headscale and the likes)
- ezoe 2y agoIf you let third party stranger to offer GPU resource, how do you deal with: 1. Privacy. An attacker can set up a GPU honey pot and and sell the data they got. 2. Fake GPU computation. An attacker can fake GPU and send back dummy data sometimes to reduce the computation. 3. Corrupt GPU. Practically same with 2. But not malicious intent. It's just the faulty GPU.
- mnahkies 2y agoI know Azure has a confidential computing offering for GPUs, which I'm hoping will get broader uptake soon. It seems like the best way to address these concerns to me. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-confidential-computing-with-nvidia-gpus-for-trustworthy-ai/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-confidential-co...
- aliljet 2y agohow would you propose this might work?
- mnahkies 2y agoI'm not an expert on the area, but I've attended some conference talks on the subject at fosdem so I'll give it a go. Essentially you're trying to provide a way to prove that the code running on the machine is what you instructed. This is achieved by a series of hardware attestations that measure and check the code to make sure it's what you requested. Generally this means encrypted ram at a minimum, and checks/balances that give you confidence this is the case (you have to trust someone, eg: Intel) Is it perfect, probably not, but it's a lot better than just running VMs with unencrypted memory that any operator can jump into. To my understanding most GPU workloads are not run in this way currently, and the operator can see/manipulate everything executed
- TazeTSchnitzel 2y agoThere's a privacy issue in both directions too: the tenant will be afraid their workload will be stolen, and the host will be afraid other data in their system will be stolen (if the sandboxing is imperfect).
- IndigoIncognito 2y agoTried deploying an instance, didn't work, no option to let me delete my billing info/ account. Identical services with better features and more availability exist
- IndigoIncognito 2y agoPS: It was a temporary server side caching issue
- anyfactor 2y agoI am interested in the business logic of paying to hosts. Say someone had netted sub 10 dollars for hosting their GPU on the platform. How do you make that payment? Business have to pay fixed plus variable transaction fees. So the small payments to a large pool of users should be quite involved specially with international payments. Since the dawn of torrenting (and to some extent the the Silicon Valley TV show) many folks tried to launch a P2P resource pool platform. The challenge is that small amount of money being distributed to a large pool is challenging. Then there is the issue of stability. Do you penalize hoster who fail to provide a stable service? Hosters must have "trust" in the system and platform can only afford to pay out only when the payable amount to hosters reach a certain threshold. Like you can't withdraw unless you have about $100 charged invoices. And that is where I see the concept of crypto tokens appear because trust as a short term mechanism can be consoled via crypto tokens. Engineering an service to take advantage of idle resources is a non-trivial task specially if the service is hooked up to doing something dedicated. For the hosters energy is not cheap, maintenance is a hassle and guranteeing stability is a pain. I would love to learn how you would address these issues.
- DeathArrow 2y agoWhat are the benefits over Salad or Vast.ai? If I pause a GPU instance will I be able to resume it on the same host so I can use the data generated before?
- floor_ 2y agoI remember gamedevs wanting a company like this to test video game drivers and shader code on a slew of different cards and vendors but this seems clearly set up for LLM work.
- DeathArrow 2y agoI like runpod the most. They offer attached network drives so you can start a GPU instance, stop it, and restart while retaining the data. This way you don't have to sync data to and from external data sources. If I want to run stable diffusion on other provides I have to install docker image, get data from somewhere, run models, sync data to somewhere so I don't lose it. The process can be tedious and time consuming.
- anshumankmr 2y agoIf I have a 3060 TI on my laptop, could I somehow rent that out? Just curious. Not that I intend to do that, but wanted to know.
- ericyd 2y agoMight just be me but I think "On demand GPU provisioning" is easier to understand than "Airbnb for GPUs"
- montebicyclelo 2y agoFrom the YC guidelines: > One good trick for describing a project concisely is to explain it as a variant of something the audience already knows. It’s like Wikipedia, but within an organization. It’s like an answering service, but for email. It’s eBay for jobs. This form of description is wonderfully efficient. Seems the risk of this is a loose simile. Edit: Though, thinking about it, Airbnb for GPUs is fairly accurate for this model of a marketplace where people let out their GPUs for others to rent.
- ericyd 2y agoYeah I think in general it's a decent strategy. I'm this case it falls short for me because a key element of Airbnb is that the assets (homes/rooms) are provided by the user base, whereas this product doesn't seem to do that at all. So the strategy of using familiar companies is good, but I think it only works when the functional correlation is strong. In this case I don't think it is.
- michaelt 2y ago> Airbnb for GPUs is fairly accurate for this model of a marketplace where people let out their GPUs for others to rent. Minimum rent 1 day? $100 cleaning fee? No quality control? Spy cameras in the bedrooms?
- Volt 2y agoThe audience here already knows what "on-demand provisioning" means.
- nojvek 2y agoThe issue with AirBnb is that it doesn’t have the best reputation nowadays.
- kobalsky 2y ago
- cfn 2y agoHow much do these kind of services pay the GPU owners? Before I sign up and add my nodes I need to know if it will be worth it considering I'm paying the power to run it, depreciation, etc.
- renewiltord 2y agoHmm, interesting. At $0.49/hr I get $0.30/hr profit out of my 4090s. It's more like Uber for GPUs. When I have spare capacity on my 4090s maybe I will look into the service.
- spencera 2y agoI like how signing up requires agreeing to the terms of service and privacy policy, but both links go to empty pages.
- nicowaltz 2y agoThese links should work now, at least they do for me. We use a third party service called Termly for these, I think there was an issue with the url (missing the www).
- wg0 2y ago> "if you’re an AI company with idle compute (hopefully not in a Stability AI way)" What are they referring to? Stability AI over provisioned hardware or something? Sorry not up to date with what's happening here, have developed a blindspot for AI hype.