At ISC 2026, NVIDIA unveiled the Vera Rubin platform — the next-generation HPC architecture, with 144 GPUs and 100% liquid cooling packed into a single research cabinet. The platform delivers 1.5 ExaFLOPS of FP8 performance per cabinet, putting TOP500-class compute into a single room.
The technical details: Vera Rubin uses NVIDIA's new "Rubin Ultra" GPU, with 288GB HBM4e and 2.5 TB/s memory bandwidth. The 144-GPU configuration uses NVLink 6 for intra-cabinet communication (130 TB/s aggregate bandwidth) and InfiniBand 8 for inter-cabinet communication. The 100% liquid cooling allows 1.5 kW per GPU, with no air cooling required.
The "TOP500 in a cabinet" highlight: a single Vera Rubin cabinet delivers more FP8 compute than the top 10 supercomputers on the TOP500 list from 2020. The platform is designed for "AI-for-Science" workloads — drug discovery, climate modeling, materials science, fusion simulation — where 1.5 ExaFLOPS of FP8 is the right scale.
The first customers: national labs (Argonne, Oak Ridge, RIKEN), pharmaceutical companies (Pfizer, Roche), and climate research centers (NCAR, Max Planck). NVIDIA expects the first cabinets to ship in Q4 2026, with broader availability in 2027.
The bigger takeaway: "AI-for-Science" is becoming a major market for HPC. The traditional HPC market (national labs, weather forecasting) is being augmented with "AI-for-Science" (drug discovery, materials science, fusion), and Vera Rubin is NVIDIA's bet on this combined market. For the industry, this signals that "AI compute for science" is the next big vertical, and the vendors that can deliver "AI + HPC" platforms will dominate.