Hello! Thrilled to be sharing something I've worked on for the past 8 months at Modal — a cloud, GPU notebooks product.
We wanted to improve the Jupyter Notebook experience while offering high-performance, cloud compute. So we sought out to fix some of the problems in cloud offerings for notebooks, and we ended up rebuilding a lot of the interface ourselves. This means you can do things like:
- Within the same notebook, swap from CPU to GPU, and the kernel will restart in seconds while keeping your work.
- Use _lots_ of hardware: up to 8x H100/B200 GPUs, not just one.
- Automatic idle shutdown (configurable timeout) so you don't get a huge bill / forget to stop your notebook.
- Real-time collaborative editing.
- Integrations with Pyright and Ruff for a better IDE-like experience.
Unlike Google Colab, we are a full cloud offering, so you can integrate with the rest of the Modal platform — use custom images, attach persistent volumes and so on. We've heard these are the actual, boring but really important features you need to do experimental work in notebooks.
Happy to hear any feedback! Would love for you to try it out.
