Lightning Cloud H100 Throughput Significantly Beats GCP
LightningAI · x · 2026-07-16
Lightning AI compared the performance differences across clouds using the same benchmark, scripts, and H100 SKU:
- Lightning: 48–49 GB/s, with all 8 GPUs participating
- GCP: 26.4 GB/s, with all 8 GPUs participating
They attribute this gap primarily to topology. The article further explains the complete tech stack of Lightning Cloud, including:
- provisioning gate
- 4 fixes upstreamed to Cloud Hypervisor
- a scheduler capable of scheduling 8-node tasks onto machines sharing the same switch
This highlights how cloud infrastructure and cluster topology significantly impact training/communication performance.
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