Placement and scheduling profiles

By default Nodus places each run on the cheapest offering that can start it now: the lowest hourly rate among the offerings that fit your request, have a machine free and stay within your limits. If that offering cannot be used, the next cheapest takes the run. Review the estimate before launch.

Profiles

placement.profile picks how the scheduler trades cost against time:

Profile	Chooses
Balanced (default)	The lowest hourly rate that meets your deadline and budget. Among offerings within 2 % of that rate, the healthier one, or the one that starts sooner, fits better or is already warm
Cost	The lowest expected cost to completion, startup, teardown and lost work included, even if it is slower to start. Among offerings within 2 % of that cost, warm capacity and a better fit win
Speed	The fastest expected finish among offerings within 1.5 × the cheapest expected cost

Balanced never chooses an offering whose rate is more than 2 % above the cheapest that meets your limits, and Cost never chooses one whose expected cost is more than 2 % above the cheapest at equal health; interruptible: Prefer gives interruptible capacity a 10 % allowance. Under Cost and Speed, an offering that often fails to start counts as dearer by that risk; under every profile, one that recently failed to start ranks lower for a few minutes within the 2 % band. When two offerings are within 2 % of each other, identical requests are spread across both instead of all taking the same one.

Deadlines and budgets

• placement.completeByTime: offerings whose p90 finish is later are not used.
• maxCostUSD, Budgets and your balance: offerings whose expected cost exceeds the money left are not used.
• placement.maxRateUSDPerHour: offerings above this rate are not used.

If nothing remains, the run waits in Queued and the estimate says why, for example MissesDeadline or ExceedsRemainingBudget.

Estimates and the If-Match ceiling

--dry-run=server -o estimate returns the expected cost p50 and p90, the startup time (cold, and warm when idle capacity of yours fits), the first hold, the minimum charge and validUntil, which is at most 31 minutes away. Creating with the estimate’s If-Match binds the launch to it: Nodus then uses no offering above the estimated rate plus 10 %, unless you set placement.maxRateUSDPerHour yourself. If prices moved beyond that, the run waits with PriceAboveEstimate instead of costing more than you saw.

Reuse before new capacity

Before acquiring capacity, the scheduler considers idle capacity that fits your request. CPU work can share Nodus nodes. A BYOC pool named in placement.pool is considered first.

Why a placement was made

nodus describe shows each attempt’s placement: the profile, the scores of the chosen offering (fit, time to result, cost to complete, recovery value, health), the fallbacks in order and every rejected offering with its reason. Offerings are shown by name, such as h100-sxm-80g-x8-us.

Multi-node runs (Beta)

For spec.distributed, Nodus first resolves the topology (nodes × GPUs per node) and then places every node together:

• network: Colocated (the default) keeps every node in one location on one network; Regional keeps them in one region class; Global allows anywhere.
• transport: Direct uses only private or direct paths between nodes; Auto also allows the relayed mesh, with lower bandwidth.
• Review the estimate for the whole gang before launch.

If no set of offerings satisfies these rules, the run waits with GangInfeasible. See multi-node training.