Linear Programming for Fun and Profit

If you haven’t noticed, the GPU market is highly volatile. NVIDIA repeatedly spews out new chip architectures, doubling FLOPS every few years. Everyone shifts towards the newest cards, causing temporary supply crunches and high prices. But Modal’s customers don’t want to think about these price fluctuations. They want GPUs of all kinds at predictable and good prices, and the ability to demand thousands of GPUs on a moment’s notice, without having to worry about pricing, capacity planning, or supply. At Modal, we’ve built a “resource solver” system which is capable of finding and enjoying arbitrages in this cloud storm, satiating our customers’ demand for scalable compute at good prices. Did you know that a few months ago you could get hundreds of superior H200 GPUs for 20% less than the going rate for inferior H100s? The solver did, and it took that deal. At its core, Modal’s resource solver is a linear programming , or LP, solver — an algorithm which can quickly and reliably maximiz ... Read full article.