Cheap machines that finish the job.
Spot capacity is cheaper because it can vanish. slipa turns that into a bounded interruption: save the work, release the machine, resume from a verified checkpoint.
The machine can leave. The job should not.
The right comparison is not spot versus on-demand by hourly rate. It is the cost of finishing a job after the machine has been reclaimed.
One eviction, two ways of handling it
Same job, same interruption, same replacement card.
A checkpoint manifest. The point a run can return to.
Work discarded. Everything the eviction threw away.
Work repeated. That same work, run a second time. With no checkpoint to return to, it is the whole run.
No GPU held. The wait for replacement capacity. Nothing is billed here.
One durable run. Machines are replaceable.
The lifecycle is shared by every supported workload. A provision failure, eviction, or missing heartbeat returns to capacity selection; a completed run delivers its result and releases the machine.
Run lifecycle
Seven phases, shared by every workload type.
Return paths
Eviction and rebid return through the same control point.
The recovery loops are the product: market volatility becomes a managed state transition rather than an operator incident.
See the hourly market. Score the completed run.
A quote is only useful if the card can meet the job’s VRAM floor, is actually available, and is likely to finish the work inside the cap. The board shows the first input; the scheduler uses the full run estimate.
Live hourly snapshot
The same GPU across multiple providers.
Reading
The lowest hourly quote is not automatically the choice for the whole job.
Notice the loss. Trust the last complete save.
The worker reports a heartbeat every ten seconds. For supported provider states, slipa also checks provider liveness every thirty seconds rather than waiting through the full heartbeat timeout.
Loss detection
Same interruption. Different response time.
Unknown states, missing data, and provider errors remain alive and fall back to heartbeat health. A false eviction is worse than a delayed recovery.
Checkpoint integrity
Manifest last. Newest verified checkpoint wins.
Manifest walk
Newest first, until one reconciles.
Writing the manifest last keeps resume work bounded. A torn checkpoint is skipped rather than trusted.
We are currently in private beta.
Available in the product
One control flow across workloads.
- Finetune, batch inference, RL rollouts, RL finetune, and hello-GPU workload types.
- Per-job budget caps, heartbeats, cost events, and resumable storage paths.
- Routing across multiple GPU providers and public bring-your-own images.
Current limitations
Not every job belongs on spot.
- Interactive or latency-sensitive work should use continuous capacity.
- Private registry credentials and multi-node training are not offered today.
- Savings bands are modelled; customer-run performance data is not claimed here.