NVLink
Connectivity
DEFINITION
NVIDIA's high-speed interconnect technology for direct GPU-to-GPU communication, bypassing the CPU and PCIe bus.
OVERVIEW
NVLink is a high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect that allows multiple GPUs to communicate directly with each other at speeds much faster than PCIe, enabling efficient multi-GPU training and inference.
TECHNICAL DETAILS
NVLink provides bidirectional bandwidth of 600 GB/s (NVLink 3.0) or 900 GB/s (NVLink 4.0), compared to PCIe 4.0's ~64 GB/s. This allows GPUs to share memory and data much more efficiently. NVLink is essential for model parallelism and large-scale distributed training where GPUs need to synchronize gradients frequently.
COMMON USE CASES
- Multi-GPU training of large models
- Model parallelism across multiple GPUs
- High-performance computing clusters
- Real-time multi-GPU inference
- Distributed deep learning