CASE STUDY: AI & HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING

AI Compute & High-Density GPU Cluster
64x NVIDIA H100 SXM5 & 400G InfiniBand Fabric

How Microlines engineered an AI supercomputing cluster featuring 64x NVIDIA H100 SXM5 GPUs, NVIDIA Quantum-2 400Gbps NDR InfiniBand interconnects, and Direct Liquid Cooling (DLC) for an enterprise Generative AI lab.

memory

64x H100 GPUs

NVIDIA SXM5 80GB

speed

400Gbps NDR

Quantum-2 InfiniBand Fabric

water_drop

Direct Liquid

Cold-Plate Heat Dissipation

verified

99.999%

Non-Blocking Compute SLA

analytics The Challenge

A Generative AI tech enterprise required a high-performance GPU cluster to train 100B+ parameter Large Language Models (LLMs). Standard PCIe GPU servers cooled by air fans suffered from severe thermal throttling (10kW+ per server chassis) and inter-node latency bottlenecks over traditional 100G Ethernet.

Key Objective:

Deploy 64x NVIDIA H100 SXM5 GPUs in HGX 8-GPU nodes, install 400Gbps NDR InfiniBand switches, integrate Direct Liquid Cooling (DLC), and deliver a turnkey Slurm cluster orchestrator.

developer_board The Microlines Solution

Microlines deployed 8x NVIDIA HGX H100 8-GPU SXM5 server nodes linked via NVIDIA Quantum-2 QM9700 400Gbps NDR InfiniBand switches. Direct-to-chip liquid cooling manifolds dissipated heat efficiently, while 4th-Gen NVLink provided 900 GB/s intra-node GPU communication.

Engineering Deliverables:

✓ 64x NVIDIA H100 SXM5 80GB GPUs across 8 HGX Server Chassis
✓ NVIDIA Quantum-2 QM9700 400Gbps NDR InfiniBand Rail-Optimized Fabric
✓ CoolIT Direct-to-Chip Liquid Cooling (DLC) Distribution Manifold
✓ 900 GB/s Bidirectional Intra-Node NVLink 4.0 Interconnects
✓ Turnkey OS, CUDA 12, PyTorch Distributed & Slurm Workload Scheduler Setup

OEM Products Deployed in Project 8

AI supercomputing hardware, InfiniBand fabric, and liquid cooling systems installed by Microlines engineers.

NVIDIA AI

NVIDIA HGX H100 8-GPU Chassis

8x H100 SXM5 80GB HBM3 GPUs, 4th-Gen NVLink 900GB/s, Transformer Engine FP8 acceleration.

NVIDIA NETWORKING NVIDIA Quantum-2 NDR

NVIDIA Quantum-2 400G InfiniBand

64-Port 400Gbps NDR InfiniBand switch, 51.2Tbps throughput, GPUDirect RDMA acceleration.

NVIDIA MELLANOX Mellanox ConnectX-7

NVIDIA ConnectX-7 400G SmartNIC

Single-port 400Gbps NDR OSFP SmartNIC, PCIe Gen 5 x16 interface, hardware offloads.

COOLIT SYSTEMS CoolIT DLC Unit

CoolIT Direct Liquid Cooling (DLC)

Warm-water direct-to-chip cooling manifold, stainless steel quick disconnects, 80%+ heat capture.

Frequently Asked Questions

Technical questions regarding 400Gbps InfiniBand, liquid cooling, and Slurm AI cluster orchestration.

NVIDIA Quantum-2 400Gbps NDR InfiniBand provides microsecond-level latency and sub-nanosecond synchronization required by GPUDirect RDMA, eliminating inter-node bottlenecking during AllReduce gradient synchronization in trillion-parameter LLMs.

Microlines installed CoolIT Direct-to-Chip Liquid Cooling cold plates on all SXM5 GPUs and CPUs. Liquid absorbs 80%+ of total chassis heat, circulating through warm-water manifolds without requiring power-hungry compressor chillers.

Each NVIDIA HGX H100 8-GPU chassis utilizes 4th-Gen NVLink and NVSwitch chips, enabling 900 GB/s bidirectional bandwidth per GPU—up to 7x faster than PCIe Gen 5.

Yes, Microlines delivers a ready-to-train AI environment complete with Ubuntu OS, NVIDIA DGX OS, CUDA Toolkit, PyTorch Distributed, and Slurm workload scheduler configuration.