GPU for university research in Quebec: rent a GPU by the hour

When to rent rather than wait for an allocation

The clusters of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada remain the right choice for large computations covered by an allocation. Renting by the hour fits the other cases: a conference submission next week, a student who has no account yet, a test before applying for an allocation, or a class that needs GPUs at a set time.

On a rented server, you are the administrator: you install the libraries you want, with no modules and no scheduler, and the GPU is shared with nobody.

For a CEGEP or a school service centre, a server with JupyterLab lets a class learn machine learning without buying graphics cards or maintaining them.

A budget that does not overflow

• Credit is prepaid, by credit card, from CA$25.00: spending follows the credit you load, and auto-reload stays optional.
• For an organization, payment by bank transfer is possible on request, to be confirmed with our team before the order.
• Invoices and a monthly usage statement download as PDF in the console, in Canadian dollars.
• The price shown is the price billed in Canadian dollars, taxes extra: no exchange rate to explain in an expense report.

The GPUs for JupyterLab, with their availability

The JupyterLab one-click template installs JupyterLab with the GPU, served over HTTPS and protected by a token. For a thesis that needs large models, servers with 2 to 8 GPUs are described in the rent an 8-GPU server guide.

Cost examples for a class and a thesis

• A class lab: 25 students × 3 hours on an RTX A6000, that is 75 hours, costs $50.25.
• A thesis project: 40 hours of training on an A100 PCIe with 80 GB cost $72.40.
• Formula: hourly rate × hours, rounded to the cent, taxes extra. Delete or hibernate the servers between sessions.

Research data and ethics

If your protocol states where the data may be hosted, the servers and their disks stay in Canada, in Montreal, in a single region. The details are on the data sovereignty page; for health data, see also the GPUs and health data guide.

Good to know before you launch

• Billing is hourly, at the server’s hourly rate, from prepaid credit. There is no per-minute billing, and the first hour is charged when you deploy.
• A stopped server is still billed at the full hourly rate. To pay less, hibernate it ($0.02 per hour (about $14.60 per month), disk kept) or delete it. A Spot machine cannot be hibernated: delete it when you are done.
• The minimum top-up is CA$25.00, paid by credit card.
• Servers and their disks stay in Canada (region canada-montreal, in Montreal). Account information (identity, billing, e-mails) may be processed outside Quebec, as the privacy policy explains.

Frequently asked questions