Computable GPU Index (CGI)
The first open-source price index for GPU compute
908 followers
The first open-source price index for GPU compute
908 followers
Computable GPU Index (CGI) is a USD price per GPU-hour, computed from the published on-demand rental rates of a fixed panel of providers. The methodology is mathematically robust, and anyone can verify and reproduce every print.
Really interesting direction. What do you see as the first real use case for CGI — cloud procurement, compute financing, or eventually something closer to a tradable benchmark?
@tizaolai886 eventually it will be a bit of everything you mentioned. the first use case is now cash settled derivatives, basically hedges on gpu prices, using CGI as a reference rate.
@raysong cool.. combining with finance is such a bold idea :)
Using a weighted median instead of a simple average seems like an important design choice. I’d be interested to understand how the weights are calculated and how you prevent one large provider—or several unusually low listings—from having too much influence on the final number.
@matthewwei so, we actually are using a interquantile mean instead of median. this means, any outlier would not have an impact on the price. the weights take in consideration of how lively a data source is. you can read more about it in our methodology!
congrats on the launch, this is a good idea - GPU pricing has needed a neutral reference rate for a while. question: since the index is built from on-demand rates only, is there any plan to also track committed-use/reserved pricing? for a lot of teams the real decision isn't "what's the on-demand rate" but "is the reserved discount worth the commitment", and that gap seems like it'd need a second number entirely rather than fitting into the same index.
@galdayan you are right, and it'd be a second index. On-demand is the most indexable tier because it's one comparable product, publicly priced at every provider, all the time. Reserved often has some private negotiation component over tenor and volume, so there's no published data to index.
Finally, a GPU price index that doesn't make me feel like I'm deciphering ancient runes.
Already sent this to my team, we've been manually tracking cloud costs in a spreadsheet like cavemen.
Any chance you'll add Lambda Labs or Vast.ai to the provider list?
@boyuan_deng1 they're already included!
Congrats on shipping this @raysong
The interquantile mean approach is smart, trims the outlier providers without throwing away real signal like a plain median would.
Just curious if spot pricing is on the roadmap, or is CGI staying on demand only for now? Following this one for sure
@abod_rehman it's staying on demand right now
Really solid writeup on the methodology, it's rare to see this much transparency.
How often do the liveness weights actually shift in practice, or is it fairly stable from week to week once things settle?
@colton_drake they are relatively stable but market microstructure changes all the time so you never know.
Nice, this is genuinely useful. GPU pricing has been a black box for so long, having an open-source benchmark like this makes it way easier! Are you planning to pull prices from just the big cloud providers, or also smaller GPU rental platforms to keep the index honest?