back to article One rack. 120kW of compute. Taking a closer look at Nvidia's DGX GB200 NVL72 beast

Nvidia revealed its most powerful DGX server to date on Monday. The 120kW rack scale system uses NVLink to stitch together 72 of its new Blackwell accelerators into what's essentially one big GPU capable of more than 1.4 exaFLOPS performance — at FP4 precision anyway. At GTC this week, we got a chance to take a closer look at …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Need to know....

    Does it run Doom?

    1. Korev Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: Need to know....

      It could in a Crysis...

      1. b0llchit Silver badge
        Coat

        Re: Need to know....

        But, but, that would mean we are Doomed.

        1. David 132 Silver badge

          Re: Need to know....

          It’s certainly a Far Cry from last year’s systems… must make Intel and AMD quake!

    2. Jellied Eel Silver badge

      Re: Need to know....

      Or 3DMark. I remember getting the 'over 9000' Steam achievement and as it has a high score table, what this beast could do. I know it's not the intended application, but I've always found it somewhat disappointing that it doesn't seem possible to use systems like this as actual graphics cards. Then again, I doubt there's any monitors that could support the potential frame rate.

    3. Howard Sway Silver badge

      Re: Need to know....

      I believe that this is the minimum hardware requirements for running Windows 13.

  2. cyberdemon Silver badge
    Alert

    Any guesses for the voltage on that busbar?

    Mine would be 48V direct to the PCBs.. The stonking thick red/black DC cables that connect each PCB to the busbars looks good enough for 100A@48V ie 4.8kW to supply each pair of Blackwell modules, each having 2 GPUs, so around 1.2kW per GPU.

    That of course would mean that the busbar itself would be carrying 2.5kA @ 48V.

    This is one hell of an expensive water heater..

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    3.2km of copper?

    I think that must be individual copper wires, not copper cable.... Otherwise there wouldn't be much room left for all that compute power in that rack.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 3.2km of copper?

      Best keep this quiet or we'll have scallies breaking into datacentres to nick the cables.

    2. Korev Silver badge
      FAIL

      Re: 3.2km of copper?

      More importantly... Shouldn't that be 22857 Linguine?

    3. DS999 Silver badge

      Re: 3.2km of copper?

      Well with each cable having 8 wires that's still 400 meters of cable. A 1000 ft (~300 meter) spool of twisted pair is pretty hefty as it is.

  4. Watashi

    WoW

    World of Warcraft still lags :(

  5. HuBo Silver badge
    Windows

    A mind-expanding voodoo explosion

    Nvidia's got a good thing here, a great base for stunning mirification of occasional museum visitors, schoolchildren on field trips, and gardeners, but desperately needs the expertise of a visually explosive voodoo tribal arts plastician to fully exploit the aesthetique potential of their new hardware (it seems). For example, last month marked the 10th anniversary of the introduction of the visually stunning (and performant) "Death Star" MacBook Pro that remains to this day, in our collective subconscious, a timeless icon of cylindrical design elegance. Couldn't the highly performant NVL72 rack be similarly reformulated into a long-lasting evocative geometry, or shape, beyond that of a Space Odyssey's prismatic monolith?

    In view of the human-face-like anthropomorphism of the GB200 (2nd and 3rd photos, and upside-down 4th) two exploratory concepts readily spring to mind. First, a retro-futuristic hommage to paleolithic cave dweller paintings, with broad strokes of GB200s (and associated arrays of stitching switches (photo 8), evocative of a hunter gatherer's bounty, possibly fish), strategically exhibited on a large wall, and ceiling, of the target museum locus. Second, a series of totem poles, with GB200s representing the faces of departed ancestors, their strengths, beliefs, and lineage (again, retro-futuristically). Cabling could run on the inside of these magnificent structures, with interconnects through the wings of the avian-descended members of the clan. The totem poles could be seated on pairs of shofar ram horns (penultimate photo) wherefrom liters per second of cooling fluids could spiritually enter and exit the piece, for maximum effect, and performance.

    Such inspirationally mind-expansive projects of computational arts should indubitably be commandited, sponsored, and even patroned, IMHO -- the opportunity is just too great to miss (for posterity)!

    1. Sgt_Oddball

      Re: A mind-expanding voodoo explosion

      Is that you amanfrommars?

      1. HuBo Silver badge
        Pint

        Re: A mind-expanding voodoo explosion

        Not quite yet, but it may be sinking in (some) ... buoying, floating, and capsizing, in the IntelAIocean that is not wAItered down by drops of sea sAIlt ... getting there, slowly but shirley, sherlock, through a lock that is sure to press the buttons of even the most wrinkled of shirts! (or somesuch ... not as easy as it looks) Your turn.

    2. Dave 126 Silver badge

      Re: A mind-expanding voodoo explosion

      > desperately needs the expertise of a visually explosive voodoo tribal arts plastician to fully exploit the aesthetique potential of their new hardware

      Er yeah, I prefer the appearence of the Cray-1 too, especially when sat on white tiles.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: A mind-expanding voodoo explosion

        Also Daleks, with a plunger for improved dataflow.

  6. Bitsminer Silver badge

    What's old is new again

    All those little boxes with fat, fat cables connecting them...

    Reminds me of SGI Altix 350 (the smaller Altix with up to 16 individual dual-cpu nodes with a big switch in the middle.) They had two very fat cables for each node.

    Fun fact: a node was called a "brick" in an unfortunate coincidence of terminology.

    Bigger Altix like the 3700BX2 used the same cables to interconnect multi-CPU blades in a larger chassis, with multiple chassis per rack.

    The 64-processor BX2 ran about 20kW in one rack. if I recall correctly. Somewhere I have a screenshot of vi occupying 13GB on a 128GB machine...

    We spent more time on the phone with SGI Minnesota negotiating power and grounding needs than we did with the salesman to buy the thing.

  7. Randy Hudson

    120kW is low

    Based on the energy transferred to the water (20ºC, 2L/s), it's more like 167kW

    1. cyberdemon Silver badge

      Re: 120kW is low

      Yes, the article said 120kW of compute

      So it probably only includes power consumed by the GPU dies, and not the 57 Arm-core "management" chip on each node, nor the DC power conversion/supply efficiency.

      But also, it's designed for 20C @ 2L/s, but it probably runs at 167kW in some sort of worst-case power-eating test for commissioning the cooling system.

      Nevertheless, the 8-rack superpod is going to need its own susbstation at 1MW...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: 120kW is low

        1 MW!!!! You kids are so lucky ... when I were a lad the cap was at 1 KW, and we had to duplex our supercomputers with the microwave ovens!

  8. s. pam
    Coffee/keyboard

    Seymor Cray must be spinning like a top

    In his grave the compute power in today's racks is insanely intense & high. I can recall in the 80's being amazed with a Cray doing 1 Gflop. Now your mobile can almost do that!

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