Storage

Ephemeral storage

Each instance comes with its own ephemeral storage (outlined in Types of instances offered), usually with NVMe SSD. This storage will exist until the instance has been turned off or pre-empted. There is no cost to use the ephemeral storage.

You can view the attached ephemeral storage by running lsblk , and mount the disk with an ext4 filesystem using the following commands

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/vdc 
sudo mkdir -p /nvme && sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/vdc /nvme

Be sure to mount the ephemeral storage directly off of /dev/vdc, without any partition, to ensure the instance can find the storage in the case of a restart.

Persistent disk storage

Getting started

Persistent disks can be created in each region and attached to new instances, allowing you to:

• Attach persistent disks to Spot Instances to checkpoint your model training when pre-empted

• Store large data in persistent disks to avoid egress fees from big clouds every time when transferring data

• Accelerate your workloads by having your data ready

• Avoid the risk of ephemeral storage for high-critical workloads

New disks can be created form the Storage tab. Each disk is local to the region you choose and can be a maximum of 15TB. To check which region an instance you want is in, use the below table or when creating it in Spot, selecting your preferred instance type will filter eligible regions. Disks can only be deleted if not attached to a running instance.

The max disk size is 15TB. Pro-tip: Give your disks different sizes to make it easier to find inside your VM.

Currently it is not possible to attach storage to existing instances or shrink/expand existing disks.

Region	GPUs available
us-central1-a	NVIDIA H100
na-east1-a	NVIDIA A40
na-east1-b	NVIDIA A5000
eu-central1-a	NVIDIA A100

When creating your next Spot or Reserved Blocks instance, you may select as many disks as needed from the same region to attach to your VM. It is not possible to attach disks to a running instance at this time; however, will be a future feature release.

Using the disk from your instance

Find the disk device name(s) using lsblk

List your block devices with lsblk. Your selected disks will start from vdd and extend to however many you added in order alphabetically.

$ lsblk

First time only - format the disks

If this is the first time using this disk, you will need to format and define a filesystem. In the below command:

• Replace /mount/dir/path with the local directory where you want the disk mounted

• Replace /dev/name with the disk name selected from the output of lsblk

⚠️ Running this command will erase the disk content if previously mounted ⚠️

sudo mkdir -p /mount/dir/path
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/name

Repeat this for all disks you are formatting.

Mount the disks

Finally, mount the disk with the below, replacing /dev/name and /mount/dir/path with the local directory of where the disk will be mounted and the disk name

sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/name /mount/dir/path
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /mount/dir/path

Repeat this for all disks you are mounting.

Quotas

Your account has limits on the amount of storage that can be created per-region. To increase these, contact Foundry through your Slack channel or by emailing [e-mail]. If you do not see the Storage tab, please reach out to be whitelisted for this feature.

Billing

Storage is billed by the disks you have provisioned and at $0.08/GB/month. For example, if you create 3 disks each 3TB, the monthly cost would be 3 disks x 3072 GB x $0.08 / GB = $737.28 This would be added to your monthly invoice. If you only used the storage for a partial-month, it would be pro-rated accordingly. You will be billed regardless of the actual usage of the disk.