Virtual Computer Abstraction

Modal's platform is presented as a virtual computer, abstracting and multiplexing compute resources across multiple cloud providers. This layer of virtualization aggregates, isolates, and multiplexes demand onto hardware at a grander scale than individual clouds, enabling higher resource efficiency for engineering teams by providing a more productive abstraction over raw cloud infrastructure. This post elaborates on the analogy of Modal as a computer, detailing how programs run, how they are stored, and how they are executed. Chai Discovery leverages this abstraction to seamlessly scale complex, bursty bio workloads, including diverse ML models and large biological datasets, from research through production. They utilize Modal Volumes for high-throughput, shared data access, eliminating repetitive data setup and ensuring consistent, reproducible execution environments. Dynamic GPU scaling and workload elasticity allow them to handle variable demand without manual orchestration or capacity planning. The platform powers everything from large-scale model training experiments to molecular design inference pipelines, enabling fast feedback loops and moving research ideas into production with minimal friction.