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Changelog

Supporting Intel Gaudi AI accelerators with SSH fleets

At dstack, our goal is to make AI container orchestration simpler and fully vendor-agnostic. That’s why we support not just leading cloud providers and on-prem environments but also a wide range of accelerators.

With our latest release, we’re adding support for Intel Gaudi AI Accelerator and launching a new partnership with Intel.

Auto-shutdown for inactive dev environments—no idle GPUs

Whether you’re using cloud or on-prem compute, you may want to test your code before launching a training task or deploying a service. dstack’s dev environments make this easy by setting up a remote machine, cloning your repository, and configuring your IDE —all within a container that has GPU access.

One issue with dev environments is forgetting to stop them or closing your laptop, leaving the GPU idle and costly. With our latest update, dstack now detects inactive environments and automatically shuts them down, saving you money.

Introducing GPU blocks and proxy jump for SSH fleets

Recent breakthroughs in open-source AI have made AI infrastructure accessible beyond public clouds, driving demand for running AI workloads in on-premises data centers and private clouds. This shift offers organizations both high-performant clusters and flexibility and control.

However, Kubernetes, while a popular choice for traditional deployments, is often too complex and low-level to address the needs of AI teams.

Originally, dstack was focused on public clouds. With the new release, dstack extends support to data centers and private clouds, offering a simpler, AI-native solution that replaces Kubernetes and Slurm.

Supporting NVIDIA and AMD accelerators on Vultr

As demand for AI infrastructure grows, the need for efficient, vendor-neutral orchestration tools is becoming increasingly important. At dstack, we’re committed to redefining AI container orchestration by prioritizing an AI-native, open-source-first approach. Today, we’re excited to share a new integration and partnership with Vultr .

This new integration enables Vultr customers to train and deploy models on both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs with greater flexibility and efficiency–using dstack.

Introducing instance volumes to persist data on instances

Until now, dstack supported data persistence only with network volumes, managed by clouds. While convenient, sometimes you might want to use a simple cache on the instance or mount an NFS share to your SSH fleet. To address this, we're now introducing instance volumes that work for both cases.

type: task 
name: llama32-task

env:
  - HF_TOKEN
  - MODEL_ID=meta-llama/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct
commands:
  - pip install vllm
  - vllm serve $MODEL_ID --max-model-len 4096
ports: [8000]

volumes:
  - /root/.dstack/cache:/root/.cache

resources:
  gpu: 16GB..

Using TPUs for fine-tuning and deploying LLMs

If you’re using or planning to use TPUs with Google Cloud, you can now do so via dstack. Just specify the TPU version and the number of cores (separated by a dash), in the gpu property under resources.

Read below to find out how to use TPUs with dstack for fine-tuning and deploying LLMs, leveraging open-source tools like Hugging Face’s Optimum TPU and vLLM .

Supporting AMD accelerators on RunPod

While dstack helps streamline the orchestration of containers for AI, its primary goal is to offer vendor independence and portability, ensuring compatibility across different hardware and cloud providers.

Inspired by the recent MI300X benchmarks, we are pleased to announce that RunPod is the first cloud provider to offer AMD GPUs through dstack, with support for other cloud providers and on-prem servers to follow.

Using volumes to optimize cold starts on RunPod

Deploying custom models in the cloud often faces the challenge of cold start times, including the time to provision a new instance and download the model. This is especially relevant for services with autoscaling when new model replicas need to be provisioned quickly.

Let's explore how dstack optimizes this process using volumes, with an example of deploying a model on RunPod.