From Sand to Superintelligence · Drill cards · Chapter 14
Drills
The NVL72 Rack
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| Front | Back |
|---|---|
| How many compute trays are in an NVL72 rack, and how many GPUs per tray? | 18 compute trays, each holding 4 Rubin GPUs and 2 Vera CPUs (typically as two Superchips). |
| How many NVLink switch trays does an NVL72 rack contain? | 9 NVLink switch trays, whose only job is to switch GPU-to-GPU traffic. |
| What is the NVL72 rack’s FP4 inference compute? | Approximately 3.6 exaflops. |
| What is the total HBM4 memory in an NVL72 rack? | About 20.7 TB (72 GPUs × 288 GB). |
| What is the NVL72’s all-to-all NVLink 6 bandwidth? | 260 TB/s. |
| What is the NVL72 rack’s power draw range? | Roughly 190–230 kW depending on Max Q (efficiency) vs Max P (peak performance) tuning. |
| How does the copper midplane reduce tray assembly time? | From roughly 2 hours per tray with conventional cabling to about 5 minutes. |
| Why does NVL72 require liquid cooling rather than air cooling? | ~200 kW is too much for air — no fan or heat sink can evacuate that power from a single rack with air alone. |
| What is the coolant path in the NVL72 liquid cooling loop? | Coolant enters through manifolds at the top, flows to cold plates bolted to each GPU, picks up heat, and returns to a coolant distribution unit (CDU) at the rack base, which routes hot coolant to the building cooling loop. |
| What is the Kyber NVL576, and how does its power figure differ from NVL72? | Kyber NVL576 is the next-generation rack NVIDIA has previewed; it pushes past 600 kW — more than double the NVL72’s 190–230 kW range. |