Keeping 20,000 GPUs healthy

Modal describes its GPU reliability system for a globally distributed autoscaling pool that has exceeded 20,000 concurrent GPUs and launched more than four million cloud instances across major providers. The company reports substantial differences in hardware performance, boot reliability, thermal behavior, memory availability, and error rates among anonymized cloud platforms, using internal benchmarks and adjusted pricing to account for these factors. Its approach combines standardized, continuously tested machine images; lightweight checks at instance startup to limit scheduling delays; passive monitoring of logs, ECC errors, temperatures, and hardware slowdowns; and weekly active stress, diagnostic, and interconnect tests for longer-lived machines. Hosts that fail checks are drained and replaced or reinstalled rather than repaired in place, while dashboards and container logs expose GPU health signals to users. Modal also emphasizes support and rapid replacement capacity for failures that evade automation, arguing that GPU reliability remains a major operational challenge compared with CPU reliability.

Use this post, company, and trend context to find content marketing opportunities, perform competitive analysis, or address product feature gaps via the Plushcap MCP server or the Plushcap API.