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cedana / blog · field reports & engineering deep-dives

Writing from the
cedana team.

Engineering notes, benchmarks, and field reports covering how we build the automation layer for AI factories.
All posts · 99

insights from the team.

Field reports, engineering deep-dives, and benchmarks from the Cedana team.

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Cedana. Blueprint of one long grey bar marked one gpu-year with a thin blue slice at its left end. A leader drops from the slice to the words the fee, and beneath them five point seven points to break even.How much utilization improvement do you need to break even on GPU checkpointing?
· Cedana Editorial

How much utilization improvement do you need to break even on GPU checkpointing?

Calculate the utilization gain needed to cover a GPU checkpointing fee using your operating cost, paid hours, restore cost and recoverable work.

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Cedana. Blueprint of a month as thirty outlined squares in a grid, each one a billed day; inside most of them a blue block rises to a different height, the share of that day's hours that produced finished work, and a few squares stand empty.Which utilization number goes into your own-versus-rent calculation?
· Cedana Editorial

Which utilization number goes into your own-versus-rent calculation?

Compare owning GPUs, renting nodes and paying per token using delivered GPU-hours, operating costs and utilization instead of demand forecasts alone.

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Cedana. Blueprint of one wide rectangle, a month's GPU bill: the left two fifths hatched grey for hours nothing ran on, the rest grey for hours the dashboard called busy, and inside that busy part a dark sliver and a red-hatched sliver at its left edge, hours spent loading and recomputing, before a solid blue block for the hours that produced work kept. A single ruled rate line runs under the whole width.How to put a dollar figure on the GPU-hours that produced nothing
· Cedana Editorial

How to put a dollar figure on the GPU-hours that produced nothing

Calculate the cost of idle GPUs, cold starts and recompute using your own hourly rate. Separate paid busy time from work your fleet actually keeps.

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Cedana. Blueprint of a laptop on the left joined by a grey dashed cable to a GPU card on the right whose status bar is grey. A clock sits above the cable and a red cross cuts it. Below, a blue save icon marked checkpoint sends a blue arrow into the card, where a blue block now sits.Why an idle notebook keeps its GPU until you kill it
· Cedana Editorial

Why an idle notebook keeps its GPU until you kill it

See why idle notebooks and Ray actors keep their GPUs, how shutdown tools release them, and what a checkpoint must preserve before a session ends.

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Cedana. Blueprint of four towers standing on one shared foundation, each tower up to three tiers tall. The first has one solid grey tier and two dashed above it; the second one solid tier with a small red cross where the next would be; the third two dotted outlines; the fourth two solid blue tiers and a dashed blue one on top.What NVIDIA Dynamo Snapshot and Modal GPU memory snapshots restore today
· Cedana Editorial

What NVIDIA Dynamo Snapshot and Modal GPU memory snapshots restore today

Compare Dynamo Snapshot, Modal, InferX and Cedana by captured state, restore compatibility, supported workloads and the limits behind their benchmarks.

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Cedana. Blueprint of two bars. The top bar is filled six tenths in grey, marked busy sixty percent. Two dashed guides drop from that grey portion to a second bar of the same width, split into a red hatched part marked lost, a dark part, and a blue part marked kept thirty-four percent.How much of your GPU utilization was work you kept?
· Cedana Editorial

How much of your GPU utilization was work you kept?

Distinguish GPU activity, MFU and useful output. Use job accounting and startup timings to estimate how much paid GPU time produced work you kept.

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Cedana. Blueprint of two rows of eight GPU cells. In the top row two cells are grey and a blue job outlined in dashes sits across three of the empty ones, with an arrow arriving from the left marked owner returns. An arrow leads down to the second row, where all eight cells are grey, and the same blue job stands whole to the right above a save icon marked checkpoint.How to fill idle GPUs without killing the job that fills them
· Cedana Editorial

How to fill idle GPUs without killing the job that fills them

Compare how GPU schedulers lend and reclaim idle capacity, what preemption costs borrowers, and where checkpointing can preserve their work.

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Cedana. Blueprint of an LLM worker's cold start as a staircase descending in seven treads to a ready floor, the second tread far longer than the rest, marked nine to thirty-four minutes. One lane below on the same span, a short blue bar marked fifty-seven to seventy seconds.Where the minutes go when an LLM worker cold starts
· Cedana Editorial

Where the minutes go when an LLM worker cold starts

Trace LLM cold starts through weight loading, compilation and warmup. Compare caching fixes with checkpoint restore and understand the storage limits.

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Cedana. Blueprint of a demand curve rising and falling above a baseline, with a thick dashed floor line drawn high across it; the area between the curve's troughs and the floor is hatched, capacity paid for and idle, while the peaks rise above the line. At one trough a small blue block sits on the baseline under a saved-state icon, the width of a restore.Can LLM inference scale to zero without paying for warm replicas?
· Cedana Editorial

Can LLM inference scale to zero without paying for warm replicas?

Understand when LLM inference can scale to zero, what warm replicas cost, and how restore time and request latency determine the capacity you keep ready.

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Cedana. Blueprint of one GPU card at the centre with a blue model block resident on it, and a dashed arc above it carrying two saved-state artifacts, the parked models. A grey dashed arrow leaves the card for the left artifact and a thick blue arrow comes in from the right one. A thin blue dashed line also runs from that artifact to a second, dashed GPU card at the lower right.How to swap models on one GPU without a cold start
· Cedana Editorial

How to swap models on one GPU without a cold start

Compare GPU model swaps using vLLM sleep mode, SGLang and checkpoint restore. Learn where parked state lives and what each swap still costs.

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Blueprint timeline of two jobs crossing a 24-hour wall-time boundary: one is terminated and restarts from zero, the other checkpoints and continues into the next allocationBlueprint timeline of two jobs crossing a 24-hour wall-time boundary: one is terminated and restarts from zero, the other checkpoints and continues into the next allocation
· Cedana Editorial

The Wall-Time Limit Forces an Expensive Tradeoff in HPC.

Jobs reach their wall-time limits and lose hours or days of in-memory progress. However, the limit itself is not the problem.

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Cedana. Blueprint of four outlined node rows of eight GPU cells, grey where in use and white where free, with two free cells scattered in each row. To the right, one eight-cell job outlined in dashed blue, marked 8-GPU job, blocked by a red cross.Why a cluster with free GPUs still cannot place an 8-GPU job
· Cedana Editorial

Why a cluster with free GPUs still cannot place an 8-GPU job

See why scattered free GPUs cannot fit a large job, what bin packing and consolidation change, and why moving running state matters for defragmentation.

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Showing 61–72 of 99 posts