Getting started

San Francisco Compute is a market for buying time on GPU clusters. For a full list of supported hardware configurations, see Instance Types.

You can buy any number of individual Virtual Machine nodes for any duration at any start time provided there is capacity available.

Buying VM Nodes

After installing the CLI, you can buy reserved nodes varying the number of nodes, duration, and start time as you like.

# buy 8 h100s VM nodes (64 gpus)         -n 8
# for 24 hours                           -d "24h"
# starting tomorrow                      -s "tomorrow at 9am"
sf nodes create -n 8 -d "24h" -s "tomorrow at 9am"

To access your nodes by SSH, you must add your keys in a startup script or configure your nodes using a cloud-init user-data file.

You can buy and get access to nodes on-demand right now by not specifying a start time.

# buy 2 h100 VM nodes (16 gpus)          -n 2
# for 1 hour                             -d "1hr"
# at $20 per node/hr ($2.50 per gpu/hr). -p "20"
# with your ssh key configuration        -U ./startup.sh
sf nodes create golden-gate cuda-crunch -n 2 -d "1hr" -p "20" -U ./startup.sh

sf nodes ssh root@cuda-crunch

You can also buy nodes in the dashboard buy page.

For more advanced usage such as custom VM images or automatically extending your reservation, see Nodes (VMs).

Buying InfiniBand Clusters

Previously, we supported interconnected Kubernetes clusters with InfiniBand. However, our existing Kubernetes capacity is sold out and we have no plans to onboard more in the immediate future.

We will support VM clusters with InfiniBand in Q1 2026. If you need InfiniBand earlier, or want to orchestrate your clusters using Kubernetes or Slurm, we'd be happy to help you set up a custom solution. Please contact us or email us at hello@sfcompute.com.

CLI Installation

To place an order on SF Compute, you'll need to sign up on the website and fund your account. If you'd like to talk to us before you do so, you can reach us at hello@sfcompute.com.

Download and install the command line tool.

curl -fsSL https://sfcompute.com/cli/install | bash

sf login

CLI options

Telemetry

The SF Compute CLI collects some usage data. This is enabled by default.

To opt out of telemetry, set the SF_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT environment variable to 1 or true.

Auto-upgrades

The CLI automatically upgrades if there’s a new patch version.

To opt out of auto-upgrades, set the SF_CLI_DISABLE_AUTO_UPGRADE environment variable to 1 or true.