Giles' blog

Automating starting Lambda Labs instances

I've been trying to get an 8x A100 instance on Lambda Labs to do a training run for my LLM from scratch series, but they're really busy at the moment, and it's rare to see anything.

Thanks to the wonders of agentic coding, I spent an hour today getting something up and running to help, which I've called lambda-manager. It has three commands:

1. list-instance-types, which prints which kinds of instances are available.
2. list-instance-type-descriptions, which prints out all of the possible instance types (available or not) with both their "friendly" names -- what you'd see on the website -- and the instance type names that the API uses.
3. launch-when-available, which polls the API until it sees a specified type of instance, at which point it starts one and sends a Telegram message.

Let's see if that helps -- though it's been running for six hours now, with no luck...