Sesterce is a French cloud headquartered in Marseille, currently claiming access to 1GW of compute, 100k GPUs under management, and €750 million of investment. They started as a crypto miner, but have recently announced a Europe-sovereign €52 billion investment plan across multiple datacenters. This plan involves an initial site in Valence Romans Agglo, which will have 40k GPUs, totaling €1.8 billion. They then plan to add two additional sites in Grand Est, totalling 600 MW of capacity and 500,000 GPUs by 2028, with additional scaling to 1.2 GW and over 1 million GPUs by 2030. Big plans.
Back to the present day, Sesterce seems to have reasonable availability of NVIDIA GPUs across their “regions” in Helsinki, Kansas City, Des Moines, Salt Lake City, Dulles, New York, Calgary, Toronto, Mumbai, Osaka, Australia, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. From this size and scale, it seems clear that individual VMs are being deployed in datacenters run by other providers. Pricing also reflects a scenario where this is some middleman getting paid.
Users can easily create volumes in the Region where they are planning to launch a GPU machine, and re-use these volumes on additional machines in the future. Nice feature.
Users can also configure a specific docker image to pre-load in the machines cache.
Our 1x B200 VM spun up in the Helsinki Datacenter, and upon login we found that the machine belongs to DataCrunch (now called Verda, another ClusterMAX bronze provider)
Clusters can be requested (but not spun up on-demand) 16 nodes at a time in Helsinki for B200, or 1-4 nodes at a time in Marseille for H100 or H200.
Unfortunately, these clusters are just bare metal machines with a shared storage option. Sesterce does not offer Slurm or Kubernetes orchestration, monitoring dashboards for the clusters, or health checks. It also seems that RBAC with authentication from external IAM providers is not available.
Logging into a Sesterce machine, with a docker image already loaded in cache
The machine also had nvidia drivers docker pre-installed, with the nvidia container toolkit configured and on the latest version. Download speeds were solid from this Helsinki location, posting some of the fastest times to install pytorch, download an ngc pytorch container, and download a model from huggingface.
Overall, our experience from Sesterce was solid. We expect that for certain users, paying the Sesterce premium for availability and a proper setup of an individual development machine offsets some of the headache that is experienced with other clouds. We encourage Sesterce to get into the game with on-demand slurm and kubernetes clusters given the solid foundation that exists from their public cloud services.
Most importantly, we encourage Sesterce to make it clear which provider is actually running the machine on their underlying platform, and to publicly communicate a third-party attestation of simple security audits and compliance, such as SOC2 Type I or ISO 27001 in order to move into the ClusterMAX ratings.