Design and VFX Studios: Let Your Workstations Earn at Night

A design, 3D or VFX studio buys workstations for the hardest day of a project: the heaviest scene, the deadline render, the biggest model. Those GPUs (RTX 4090s, RTX 5090s, professional cards with large memory) then spend nights, weekends and quiet weeks switched off or idle.

Spot nodes on ParalonCloud let those machines work when the studio doesn't, and be back at every desk before anyone logs in.

Why spot fits a studio

• The machines are needed on a schedule, not on demand. Spot is built for that: one Pause / Resume button per workstation, and a bar to flip the whole studio at once.
• Getting a machine back is fast and predictable. Pausing gives a running rental two minutes' notice, lets inference finish what it's doing within two minutes, and places nothing new. Someone arriving early waits a couple of minutes at most.
• Your work and the network's never mix. The agent runs in a container. Rentals and inference can't see the workstation's files, projects or licences, and a rental can't reach other machines on the studio network.
• No reputation cost. Spot rentals aren't scored, so reclaiming every morning is normal use, not a black mark.

Setting up the workstations

Each workstation is its own node:

1. In the Dashboard, Add node: name it after the desk or the artist (desk-maria), choose GPU and the OS (Linux, or Windows with Docker Desktop on WSL2).
2. Advanced options → Spot. Untick Available if people are working on it during setup.
3. Run the install command on the workstation.

A multi-GPU workstation can offer only some of its cards: add --gpus device=… to the install command to keep one GPU free for the artist even while the machine is Available. See Add a Node.

The routine

• End of day: Resume all, or select the desks that are free tonight and set just those.
• Start of day: Pause all a few minutes before people arrive.
• Someone stays late: leave their desk Paused; tick the others and release them.

Plan for the usual overnight hazards: machines that sleep, hibernate or reboot for updates cut off whatever is running. Turn off sleep on the overnight profile and schedule updates outside the hours the machines are Available.

What about render jobs?

ParalonCloud also runs a Blender render service, but render jobs never go to spot nodes: a frame range that might take hours shouldn't be placed on a machine that can be reclaimed. Spot workstations get rentals and inference. If the studio wants its own render work on its own machines, pause them and use them as usual.

Earnings

What a workstation rents for depends on its GPU; see the Pricing page. Spot nodes rent at that price minus the spot discount shown on each node card, and you keep 80% of what each rental bills. Weigh it against the workstations' overnight power draw for your own electricity price.

Next

• Spot Nodes — the full reference.
• Sell Spare Data-Center GPU Capacity Without Losing Control — the same idea for server rooms.
• Rewards & Earnings — how earnings are credited.