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                            Cloud providers offer instances with similar compute capabilities (for example, instances with different generations of GPUs like K80s, P100s, V100s) across many regions, availability zones, and on-demand and spot markets, with prices governed independently by individual supplies and demands. In this paper, using machine learning model training as an example application, we explore the potential cost reductions possible by leveraging this cross-cloud instance market. We present quantitative results on how the prices of cloud instances change with time, and how total costs can be decreased by considering this dynamic pricing market. Our preliminary experiments show that a) the optimal instance choice for a model is dependent on both the objective (e.g., cost, time, or combination) and the model’s performance characteristics, b) the cost of moving training jobs between instances is cheap, c) jobs do not need to be preempted more frequently than once a day to leverage the benefits from spot instance price variations, and d) the cost of training a model can be decreased by as much as 3.5× compared to a static policy. We also look at contexts where users specify higherlevel objectives over collections of jobs, show examples of policies for these contexts, and discuss additional challenges involved in making these cost reductions viable. 
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