In 2023, Jason Warner and Eiso Kant founded poolside to build AI for software development, reshaping developers’ experience with both assistant and frontier models built for one another. 

With over $600M in funding, poolside deploys AI systems within their customer’s existing infrastructure. No data or code leaves their security boundaries.

poolside is building a future-proof AI workflow for software engineers: “Our vision for the future is one where developers can build software with AI as an intuitive, secure, and flexible collaborator,” said Jason Warner. 

Their combination of foundation modeling, APIs, and assistants designed for highly complex environments such as financial services, defense, technology as well as systems integrators and any other verticals with strict security and compliance requirements.

Focused on advancing the enterprise, they needed a partner that could reliably deliver a secure architecture without compromising on availability and flexible and economical prices.

The Challenge: Slow, Expensive, and Inflexible Options

poolside had two goals.The first was a hardware and performance requirement; they needed high-performance and reliable GPU compute. The second was agility; because poolside is a fast-moving company, it required flexible and immediate access to compute resources. The mainstream market does not come without compromises. Existing players often have lead times that can rapidly spiral and come with lengthy commitment rates. 

Additionally, existing cloud platform performance was not optimised for AI workloads. Outdated support models are also frequently unable to support customers who need to run on highly reliable, resilient clusters. Instead of using a legacy player, poolside decided to partner with Fluidstack to efficiently deploy a powerful and cost-effective stack.

The Solution

Within 24 hours of signing with Fluidstack, poolside had access to an enterprise-grade HPC stack with over 2,500+ GPUs. This cluster of A100s and H100s shipped with some noteworthy benefits: high performance, agile deployment, and attractive pricing.

Performance: Optimised Workloads and 24/7 Support Coverage

Fluidstack’s global engineering team enabled 24/7 support using trusted, familiar communication channels. Leveraging their forward deployed engineers, their technical talent became extension to poolside’s engineering team, providing support pre- and post-deployment:

“Fluidstack’s dedicated support is excellent. Day and night.” Eiso Kant CTO of poolside. Their engineers shared insights into the GPU cloud market, including the NVIDIA product roadmap. They studied poolside’s workloads and recommended appropriate cluster specifications. 

Once the cluster was live, Fluidstack’s software platform supported, maintained, and tuned poolside’s workloads for peak performance. This included managing common errors such as GPU ECC errors, and helped to automatically fix these issues for poolside. Fluidstack empowered poolside to optimize their compute strategy, reducing costs and time-to-market, alongside ensuring high performance during operations.

Speed: 2,560 GPUs deployed within two days

Traditional hyperscalers can require a three-month wait time; Fluidstack, meanwhile, offers a lead time measured in days for multi-thousand GPU clusters. For poolside, 2,560 GPUs were available just 48 hours after contract-signing. 

“Operationally, the pace at which the team moves is unprecedented – this led to the fastest lead times and support from any of the partners we worked with.”Margarida Garciam, VP Operations of poolside. In short, by ensuring immediate access to high-performance and secure infrastructure, Fluidstack empowered poolside to iterate on model development without delay.

Pricing: All-Inclusive & Cost-Effective

Fluidstack’s pricing model was a game-changer for poolside. Fluidstack’s pricing bundled:24/7 engineering support with 15-minute response times on Slack99% uptime SLA at both node and InfiniBand networking levelsFully-managed Slurm or Kubernetes, including setup, maintenance, and frequent upgradesProactive monitoring of all cluster components. Fluidstack’s pricing was both market-competitive and transparent. For a predictable budget, poolside could run large AI workloads.

Impact: Faster Market Entry, Continuous Model Optimization, and Cost Management poolside is able to attribute certain highlights of its early success to the Fluidstack partnership.“From a business perspective, Fluidstack allowed us to start training our models earlier than expected with a level of flexibility others couldn’t offer.” Margarida Garcia VP Operations of poolside added. 

Accelerated Market Entry: With Fluidstack’s prompt lead time, poolside was able to deploy its MVP ahead of schedule

Enhanced Model Optimization: poolside could scale its GPU cluster with ease, enabling fast iterations to improve the model’s accuracy

Cost-Saving: Fluidstack’s transparent pricing provided poolside with flexibility and immediate savings, allowing it to scale-up without financial headaches. Because of Fluidstack, poolside was able to place its focus on its product at a critical time in the journey.

Closing Thoughts 

poolside’s experience with Fluidstack underscores that a powerful, secure GPU cluster shouldn’t come at the price of slow lead times, expensive costs, and poor support.

“One of the most important aspects of running an AI company is access to compute. We all know that large-scale clusters are difficult to operate, but Fluidstack has been exceptional,” added Jason Warner CEO.

In addition to Poolside, Fluidstack works with top AI labs, building 10k+ clusters for the world’s leading AI companies.

If you want to discuss your GPU needs, click here to speak with our engineers.