Modal

What is Modal?

Modal is a cloud function platform designed for AI, machine learning, and data teams to run compute-intensive applications without managing infrastructure. It offers fast, serverless execution of Python code with autoscaling capabilities, including GPU support, enabling developers to deploy inference endpoints, batch jobs, and scheduled tasks seamlessly. Modal abstracts away infrastructure complexity by providing an intuitive Python-based interface to define container environments, hardware requirements, and persistent storage, while charging users only for actual compute time used. Its integration with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure ensures high performance and cost efficiency for large-scale AI workloads.

Key Features

• Serverless Autoscaling

  Automatically scales compute resources up to hundreds of GPUs and down to zero within seconds, ensuring efficient resource utilization and cost savings.

• High Resource Limits

  Supports up to 64 CPUs, 336 GB RAM, and 8 Nvidia H100 GPUs per container, enabling execution of demanding AI and ML workloads.

• Python-Centric Development

  Developers write and deploy Python functions with infrastructure defined as code, eliminating the need for manual setup or YAML configurations.

• Flexible Deployment Options

  Functions can be served as web endpoints, cron jobs, or batch processing tasks, with built-in support for distributed computing primitives.

• GPU-Accelerated AI Workloads

  Optimized for AI model inference, fine-tuning, and batch jobs with rapid GPU container spin-up and integration with powerful cloud GPUs.

• Pay-As-You-Go Pricing

  Charges based on actual CPU, GPU, and memory usage per second, eliminating costs for idle resources.

Use Cases

• AI Model Inference and Fine-Tuning : Run large-scale model inference or fine-tune models on GPUs with minimal setup and fast deployment.
• Data Pipelines and Batch Processing : Execute complex data workflows, ETL jobs, and batch computations at scale with autoscaling compute resources.
• Real-Time Web Applications : Serve AI-powered web endpoints and APIs with low latency and real-time websocket support.
• Scheduled Jobs and Automation : Deploy cron-like scheduled tasks for routine data processing or model retraining without managing infrastructure.
• Machine Learning Research and Experimentation : Rapidly prototype and iterate on ML models with instant access to scalable compute and persistent storage.

FAQs