Today, Microsoft showcased its newest NVIDIA GB200 systems through the official Microsoft Azure X account. The company also showcased its next-gen NVIDIA training and inferencing platform, which is key because it also shows the giant cooling solution needed for this rack. By giant the coolant distribution unit, or CDU, takes up twice as much aisle space as the GB200 compute rack.
New Microsoft Azure NVIDIA GB200 Systems Shown
Here is the post of the Microsoft Azure NVIDIA GB200 system on X where it says it is the first NVIDIA Blackwell cloud.
Microsoft Azure is the 1st cloud running @nvidia‘s Blackwell system with GB200-powered AI servers. We’re optimizing at every layer to power the world’s most advanced AI models, leveraging Infiniband networking and innovative closed loop liquid cooling. Learn more at MS Ignite. pic.twitter.com/K1dKbwS2Ew
— Microsoft Azure (@Azure) October 8, 2024
Taking a quick look at the rack, something is immediately obvious, the cooler dwarfs the compute rack, even though the compute rack only shows 8 GB200 trays installed.
The left side of the image is the GB200 rack. The right side is twice as wide as the left. On the right side, we can see the giant liquid-to-air heat exchanger, essentially a fancy version of a car radiator, along with the pumps, power, and monitoring.
Final Words
Kudos to Microsoft Azure for being the first cloud with the NVIDIA GB200 solutions. We just thought that it is fun that Microsoft, unlike secretive organizations like AWS and Google, was proud enough to share its design not just for the rack, but also for the CDU.
For years, folks on the desktop side have used larger and larger air coolers, and liquid coolers. This is fun for computer enthusiasts because it is a case where the liquid cooler is roughly twice the size of the compute and networking rack itself.
Of course, this is necessary as the NVIDIA GB200 NVL designs are very dense.