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Reduce GVisor Cold Starts with GPU Snapshotting

Cerebrium introduces a GPU memory snapshotting technique that reduces cold start times for CUDA workloads from minutes to seconds by saving and restoring GPU state across container restarts, improving efficiency for serverless GPU deployments.

Background

Cerebrium is a serverless GPU platform competing with AWS SageMaker, Banan, and Replicate. "Cold starts" are the delay when a GPU container loads from scratch (often 30-60s), which is costly for bursty or interactive AI workloads. They claim to solve this with Nvidia's GPU memory snapshotting (via cuSnapshot API or similar), letting them freeze+restore CUDA state in seconds. This is analogous to how AWS Lambda (serverless CPU) uses Firecracker microVMs to cut cold starts — but applied to GPU-bound ML inference.

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