liquid cooling
AI infra interview questions tagged liquid cooling, across every topic.
2 questions · 1 unlocked for you
Concepts behind "liquid cooling"
The curriculum that explains the ideas these questions test.
Foundational
Direct-to-Chip Liquid Cooling and CDUsAbove roughly 40 kW a rack cannot be cooled by air in any practical hall, which is why every dense GPU deployment now runs liquid to the chip. A cold plate sits on each GPU, a coolant distribution unit isolates the clean rack loop from facility water, and the facility side runs warm, typically 30 to 40 degrees supply, because warm water is cheaper to make. The design numbers are flow rate and temperature rise, and both fall out of one equation that every operator should be able to do from memory.🖧 Hardware & Cluster Build-Out
Advanced
Power and Datacenter ConstraintsThe binding constraint on new GPU capacity in 2026 is not chips or capital but megawatts: an H100 node draws about 10 kW, a GB200 NVL72 rack about 120 kW, and a 100,000-GPU cluster needs on the order of 150 MW with cooling. This page converts GPU counts to power, power to cooling and facility requirements, and both to cost, so a candidate can size a training hall from a power budget and explain why liquid cooling, PUE and the local grid decide where the next cluster goes.🧮 Napkin Math & Capacity🔒 Premium
Advanced
Thermal, Power and Cooling EventsA GPU that gets too hot or is denied power does not fail; it slows down, and on a synchronous job a slow GPU is a slow job. Thermal and power events are the most common cause of the 'nothing failed but the run is 15% slower' ticket, and they are the incidents that scale from one node to a whole hall when a cooling distribution unit or a power feed has a problem. This page explains how throttling works, derives the step-time cost of a clock reduction, walks the failure modes of air and liquid cooling, and covers the power behaviour peculiar to training: thousands of GPUs going idle and busy in lockstep.🩺 Fleet Reliability & Observability🔒 Premium