Lend a machine#

Your machine is idle most nights; a friend, a colleague's team or a partner organisation could use it. Lending lets their work run on some of your machines, on your terms, while the machines stay yours: you see what their work used and what ran, and you take the machines back whenever you want.

Lending is done by an organisation's admins (the permission machines:lend). The borrower accepts the offer first; nothing of theirs runs before.

Who can borrow#

For	What they get	Where
A person	Their own work, in their personal workspace. Other people's work never runs there, even in the same workspace.	Astraeus Cloud; on your own cluster, one of your organisation's people.
A workspace	The work of one workspace they choose when they accept.	Astraeus Cloud; on your own cluster, one of your organisation's workspaces.
An organisation	The work of every workspace of theirs.	Astraeus Cloud only.

On a cluster of your own, only your organisation's work runs, so lending there is between your own people and workspaces: a way to give a workspace a machine outside its pools, on terms.

The terms#

Term	What it does	Default
When	`always`, or only when my GPUs are idle: their work runs at the lowest priority, and your own work — of any priority — stops it within seconds (a 5 s stop grace) when it needs the GPUs.	Only when idle (console); `always` (API)
Hours	A window in your time zone (`22:00`–`07:00`, `America/Sao_Paulo`), on some days or every day. A window that ends before it starts runs across midnight. Outside it nothing new of theirs is placed, and what runs is stopped within seconds.	Any hour
GPUs at most	How many GPUs of each machine their work may hold at once.	All
Until	When the lending ends by itself. Both sides are told a day before.	Until you take it back
GPU power limit	The GPUs' power cap (30–1500 W) while their work runs; the machine's own limit comes back when it ends, or when the agent restarts.	The machine's own
Plain containers	Whether their work may run in an ordinary container. Without it their work runs sandboxed (gVisor): its system calls are served by a kernel in user space, never your machine's. gVisor cannot reach GPUs here, so GPU work needs plain containers.	Allowed (console); sandboxed (API)

Whatever the terms, borrowed work never gets more of the machine than a container: no privileged mode, no host PID or IPC namespace, no added capabilities, no bind mount of the machine's paths — even when the borrower's workspace was granted those on its own machines.

Lend#

ConsoleCLIAPI

Open Astraeus → Machines and click the machine.
Click Lend this machine (organisation admins). To lend several, tick them on that page.
Enter the e-mail address of who may accept it, and choose For: a person, a workspace or an organisation.
Set the terms. The panel beside the form says, in words, what they get and what you will see.
Click Send the offer.

They are e-mailed (and notified in the console when they have an account). The offer waits 14 days. Organisation → Lendings follows it: offered, then active once accepted.

$ astra astraeus lend gpu-home-1 --to [email protected] --kind person \
    --when idle --hours 22:00-07:00 --time-zone America/Sao_Paulo \
    --max-gpus 1 --until 30d --allow-plain-containers \
    --note "Nights only, for your thesis runs."
offered to [email protected] (person): 0199c2f1-…

--until takes a date (RFC 3339) or a duration from now (30d, 12h); --days mon,tue,… limits the hours to some days; --power-limit 250 caps the GPUs.

Below, <org> and <cluster> stand for your organisation's and cluster's short names.

$ curl -sS -X POST \
    "https://api.astralyx.cloud/v1/organizations/<org>/clusters/<cluster>/lendings" \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer $ASTRALYX_TOKEN" -H 'content-type: application/json' \
    -d '{"nodes": ["gpu-home-1"], "kind": "person", "to": "[email protected]",
         "terms": {"when": "idle", "hours": {"from": "22:00", "to": "07:00", "time_zone": "America/Sao_Paulo"},
                   "max_gpus": 1, "until": "2026-11-30T00:00:00Z", "allow_plain_containers": true}}'

Error	Why
`400 INVALID_TERMS`	Hours not `HH:MM`, an unknown time zone, `until` in the past, a power limit outside 30–1500 W.
`400 LEND_ON_HOSTED`	An organisation borrows only on Astraeus Cloud.
`403 NOT_YOUR_MACHINE`	A machine named is not your organisation's on that cluster.

An AI assistant connected to Astralyx can lend too (lend_machines, in the Lending machines toolset); you confirm it in the console first.

Change the terms, take it back#

Open Organisation → Lendings and the lending:

Change the terms (PUT …/lendings/{id}/terms, astra astraeus lendings terms <id> …): from now on. Work outside new hours is stopped within seconds; the borrower is told.
Take back (POST …/lendings/{id}/take-back, astra astraeus lendings take-back <id>): ends it now — an offer not accepted yet is withdrawn. Borrowed work on the machines gets its stop signal and its grace, and is told the lender took the machine back; it goes back to its queue without spending its restarts, and starts again wherever else it may run.

The same happens when the lending reaches its until, and if a machine leaves your organisation.

What you see#

On the lending's page, and with astra astraeus lendings usage <id>:

Usage: GPU-hours reserved and used, CPU core-hours, memory, network and energy, per machine, per borrowing workspace and per person, by kind of work (runs, deployments, agent runs, functions, notebooks), with the largest workloads, over a period you choose — as a CSV too. Energy is your GPUs' own power readings plus an estimate for the CPU. See Machine usage report.
What ran: each borrowed workload's name, kind, image, workspace, person, machine, GPUs and their average use, start and end, and why it was stopped.

You never see their logs, files, environment variables or commands. A person of another organisation is shown as a person of , unless they borrowed in person.

On the machine's page, Work on this machine shows their work as taken (GPUs, cores, memory), as it shows another workspace's.

Notifications#

Both sides are told — in the console and by e-mail (each person chooses in Notifications → Settings, kind Machines lent) — when an offer is made, accepted or declined, when a lending ends within a day, when the terms change, and when it is taken back, given back or ended.