Prompt
Do I need spot GPUs for experiments?
Latest observation
Oct 18, 2026
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Not necessarily.
You need spot GPUs only if your experiments are flexible enough to tolerate interruptions and you want to reduce cost. Spot instances are a good fit when:
- training jobs can be checkpointed and resumed
- you can re-run interrupted experiments
- you’re doing many short or exploratory runs
- cost matters more than guaranteed uptime
You probably should avoid spot GPUs if:
- the experiment is long and hard to resume cleanly
- you need stable, uninterrupted runs
- you have tight deadlines
- your setup doesn’t support checkpointing well
- you’re doing debugging where interruptions would be annoying
A practical rule:
- Use spot for scale, sweeps, and batch training
- Use on-demand for critical runs, demos, and debugging
If you want, I can help you decide based on your specific experiment type, framework, and budget.