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Reduce GVisor Cold Starts with GPU Snapshotting

Yaseen Hamdulay Member of Technical Staff

Reducing GPU Cold Starts with Memory Snapshots: Restoring CUDA Workloads in Seconds

If you run AI models in production, you have a relationship with cold starts whether you want one or not.

A three-minute startup time changes how you scale. You keep GPUs warm that could have been released. You over-provision to avoid making users wait. You stretch cooldown periods because scaling down too quickly creates pain on the next spike. The application starts accumulating complexity around one problem: getting a model ready to serve traffic fast enough.

At Cerebrium, we have been obsessed with the cold start problem since day one. That obsession has pushed us to rethink almost every layer of our infrastructure:

Custom VM images for faster node scale-ups