Release v1.44.1: Support for a3-ultragpu-8g VMs and GKE, Slurm clusters

[tpdownes]

Release notes v1.44.1

This release announces Toolkit support for the new A3 Ultra machine type from Google Cloud. This machine type includes 8 NVIDIA H200 GPUs each with dedicated CX-7 networking with RDMA support via RoCE.

The release includes 4 blueprints that maximize performance for the machine type:

1. A simple Slurm blueprint provisioning A3 Ultra compute nodes with a shared Filestore /home
2. A GKE blueprint that provisions an A3 Ultra compute node pool
3. An advanced Slurm blueprint that additionally mounts a GCS bucket with performance-optimized caching settings for I/O and checkpointing.
4. A blueprint that provisions A3 Ultra compute nodes as VM instances (no scheduler) with RDMA networking

Example solutions using NCCL are provided for blueprints running under a scheduler.

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This discussion was created from the release Release v1.44.1: Support for a3-ultragpu-8g VMs and GKE, Slurm clusters.