[ssl-3]

I think it'd be best to pool with people with different patterns, not the same patterns. Perhaps it would be best to pool with people in different timezones, and/or with different work/sleep schedules.

If everyone in a pool uses it during the ~same periods and sleeps during the ~same periods, then the node would oscillate between contention and idle -- every day. This seems largely avoidable.

(Or, darker: Maybe the contention/idle dichotomy is a feature, not a bug. After all, when one has control of $14k/month of hardware that is sitting idle reliably-enough for significant periods every day, then one becomes incentivized to devise a way to sell that idle time for other purposes.)

[vineyardmike]

This is basically why the big companies can sell subscriptions for cheaper than API costs. First priority can go to API users, lower priority subscription users get slotted in as space/SLO allows, and then sell the remaining idle GPU to batch users and spare training. Oh and geography shift as necessary for different nations working hours.