Courses with GPUs
You can provide GPU-enabled machines for your students to practice GPU programming in your Nuvolos course.
Nuvolos supports 2 workflows for courses with GPUs: the first approach is GPU Lab Sessions and the second is On-Demand GPU Courses.
Enable GPUs in your course
Make sure you have enough credits in the resource pool mapped to the space.
Make sure you have enabled credit-based sizes in your teaching space.
Now you can decide which flow to use in your course.
GPU Lab Sessions
GPU Lab Sessions are exactly what their name implies: your students can use GPU-enabled machines to practice GPU programming during planned sessions. The experience is like having a virtual lab, where e.g. each student of course GPU101 can use a remote machine with a Tesla T4 card between 10:00-12:00 Mondays, for 8 weeks.
Such GPU Lab Sessions have the following properties that make them appealing:
Easy to explain to students
Equal opportunity for all students to use machines with the exact same specifications in the exact same time windows
All students start with the exact same environment (JupyterLab, VSCode, etc.), but they can make persistent changes to the installed packages and settings.
Ideal for exams or courses where access is only needed during specific time windows
Predictable, flat pricing. Once you know all the times and durations of all lab sessions, your total cost is fixed.
In this workflow, every space administrator can launch GPU-enabled machines in the Master instance anytime. This way, instructors can easily work on the course material right in the course space. Students however cannot start GPU-enabled machines themselves: instructors need to define lab sessions for them. This means, students only need to sign in to Nuvolos when the lab session starts, and they'll find an already running, GPU-enabled Nuvolos application.
Schedule a GPU Lab Sessions
You can schedule a lab session using the Schedule for startup feature. For that, you need to have an application that you have already distributed to all course participants.
To schedule a session on machines with GPU:
Make sure you have distributed the application for all students in the space
Click the Schedule for startup button
Turn on the Scale resources toggle and select the GPU size and configure the Stop after selected minutes field.

Limitations of GPU Lab Sessions
In teaching spaces, only smaller GPUs are enabled, like the Testa T4 and ⅙ A10. Check the Schedule for start menu for current offers in sizes.
Currently up to 90 concurrent students are supported only. Please reach out to support to clear GPU sizes/attendant lists larger than this.
Stop after selected minutes can only be set between 30 and 360 minutes.
The total cost of a session with N students will be around N*[session length in hours]*[hourly price of GPU machine] + warmup premium, where the warmup premium means that applications are started 30-10 minutes ahead of time to allow for longer machine provisioning times due to higher machine checkout frequency around course start time.
Scheduled startups using GPU machines will not consider past user activity and will start up a GPU machine for every user in the course space.
Any running applications started by students will be restarted at the scheduled startup time and moved to GPU machines automatically.
On-demand GPU courses
The other available workflow is the On-demand GPU course approach. As the name implies, in this case students can start up GPU-enabled machines on demand, and not according to a fixed schedule. This has the following nice properties:
More flexible as GPU Lab Sessions: students can decide when they want to use the machines.
Equal opportunity for all students to use machines with the exact same specifications for exactly the same total runtime
All students start with the exact same environment (JupyterLab, VSCode, etc.), but they can make persistent changes to the installed packages and settings.
Ideal for assignments or courses where students are expected to practice outside course hours.
Predictable, capped pricing. You define at most how much credits your students are allowed to spend. This gives a predicable cap on your expenses.
Configure On-demand GPU access
In this workflow, every space administrator can launch GPU-enabled machines in the Master instance anytime. This way, instructors can easily work on the course material right in the course space. Students can also start GPU-enabled machines themselves, provided they have not reached their spending limit.
Fixed credit limit schedule
To use on-demand GPU access, you can define a fixed credit limit schedule like the following:
1.2
2025-09-15
Yes
1.2
2025-09-22
Yes
0.6
2025-09-29
Yes
In the above example, every students instance (may it be individual or group) can
consume up to 1.2 credits from the creation of the space until 2025-09-15 EOD
consume up to 1.2 credits more from 2025-09-16 to 2025-09-22 EOD
consume up to 0.6 credits more from 2025-09-23 to 2025-09-29 EOD
from 2025-09-30, students cannot start GPU-enabled sizes anymore
This means, every student instance can consume at most 3 credits until 2025-09-29. The actual usage will be typically less because
in case an instance has 0 credit usage until 2025-09-16, then it may only consume up to 1.8 credits. This is because counter reset is true for all rows, meaning that consumption is reset to 0 on these dates, and a new period begins.
Tiered credit limit schedule
You can also define a tiered credit limit schedule for the students. Consider a similar schedule as before, but now with Counter reset set to No.
1.2
2025-09-15
No
2.4
2025-09-22
No
3.0
2025-09-29
Yes
In the above example, every students instance (may it be individual or group) can
consume up to 1.2 credits from the creation of the space until 2025-09-15 EOD
consume up to 2.4 credits from the creation of the space until 2025-09-22 EOD
consume up to 3.0 credits from the creation of the space until 2025-09-29 EOD
from 2025-09-30, students cannot start GPU-enabled sizes anymore
The difference compared to a fixed credit limit schedule is that unused credits are not lost in intermediate dates. An instance that becomes active only in the last week can still utilize all 3 credits.
Monitor credit limits and usage
Every instructor can see in the Master instance the currently active credit limit in the applications view:

Every student can see in their instance the limit, how much they've used so far and the end date of the active limit:

To monitor your total spendings in the course, go to the Resources dashboard.
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