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National Compute documentation

National Compute is burst GPU capacity: nodes join your cluster in real time when you need them and leave when you don't. You declare how many GPUs you want and the most you'll pay per GPU-hour; supply is allocated by price, so you hold capacity while the market clears at or under your ceiling and are billed what the auction assesses — never above your ceiling.

Public Marshall offers model chat without sign-in, with a sponsored allowance per browser visitor. Sign in for saved sessions, shells and persistent files.

There are three ways to consume capacity:

  • VM clusters — declare a GPU count and a price ceiling; granted nodes are yours over ssh until they are reclaimed or you scale down. See the VM capacity API.
  • Kubernetes clusters — a dedicated cluster whose GPU jobs create the demand by themselves, each job one request priced in whole nodes on the market; the only knob is your price ceiling. See Kubernetes clusters and the limit price API.
  • Public Research — one whole node at a time for a researcher at a public research organization, requested from Marshall and used over ssh at a flat rate, outside the auction. See Public Research.

Start here

  1. Burst capacity — how capacity is allocated: the auction, protection windows, and pricing.
  2. Authentication — mint an org API token and make your first call.
  3. Billing — what the meter measures, and what is never billed.
  4. API reference — conventions, endpoints, errors, and the machine-readable OpenAPI contracts.

Questions about base load capacity, preemption, pricing, or the access model? The FAQ covers the ones we hear most.

For agents

If an AI agent drives your capacity, point it at nationalcompute.com/FIRST-JOB.md to run your first job, and at nationalcompute.com/llms.txt and nationalcompute.com/AGENTS.md for orientation — pages served unauthenticated for exactly that purpose. The console's Getting Started page carries the prompt to paste. The OpenAPI contracts are unauthenticated too, so an agent can discover the wire before it holds a token:

An agent that speaks MCP (Model Context Protocol) takes the surface as tools instead of routes. The hosted MCP server at https://nationalcompute.com/mcp carries market data, capacity, limit prices, billing, hardware metrics and server-side Kubernetes access behind one OAuth sign-in, with no token to mint. Claude Code, Codex and Cursor add it with one line of configuration.

The starter recipes FIRST-JOB.md walks through are a catalog at access.nationalcompute.com/first-job/: each recipe's cluster kind, category, description, default file and vendor variants, as JSON, next to the manifests themselves.

A program reads these pages at nationalcompute.com/docs/<page>, no token needed, the same paths as this site — or as markdown here: a page's URL minus the trailing slash, plus .md (/market/ becomes /market.md), is its source with every link made absolute. Every HTML page names that form in a <link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown">. llms.txt indexes every page that way, with a one-line description each; llms-full.txt is the whole site in one file; sitemap.xml lists the pages.

The specs are the authority whenever these pages and a spec disagree.