| 7 Oct 2025 |
 Lun | gfx90a (MI210/250) is the oldest instinct option upstream seems to actually be paying attention to | 19:41:26 |
 SomeoneSerge (back on matrix) | Relatable: azure offers the right hw for us, but I'm not confident we can utilize it efficiently enough yet | 19:44:47 |
| Lun | I see a NGads V620-series option on a different page which is supposedly gfx1030 (probably rebranded W6800 cards) | 19:47:01 |
| 8 Oct 2025 |
 connor (burnt/out) (UTC-8) | I’ll try to get it cleaned up and pushed
Broadly I used NixOS-anywhere to install machines provisioned with Ubuntu because I didn’t want to deal with blob storage accounts and VHDs (though it should very doable to produce images)
IIRC the tricky part was finding the kernel modules missing for the HB series (I never got around to packaging the mellanox drivers but whatever they still have very fast IP connections) | 15:23:50 |
| connor (burnt/out) (UTC-8) | Thankfully Azure offers serial console through their web console so I was able to debug that (shout out to @jmbaur for being an absolute saint and walking me through the kernel side of stuff) | 15:25:29 |
| SomeoneSerge (back on matrix) |
(though it should very doable to produce images)
I only tried once and, well, producing images if trivial of course, but making azure consume them... I got completely lost somewhere between "Azure Compute Galleries" and "x64 vs arm64 disks"
| 15:40:15 |
| connor (burnt/out) (UTC-8) | I swear at some point in https://github.com/ConnorBaker/nix-cuda-test I had written scripts to create and upload VHDs, provision Azure instances, and do builds on them; the goal being to then have scripts which provision Lambda Labs instances which pull in and run the builds to do GPU testing (since it’s cheaper than Azure GPU instances) | 16:05:41 |
