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Thermal, Power and Cooling Events
A 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.
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