NVIDIA H300 vs H100 vs H200 GPU Setup on Kubernetes

💡 Quick Answer: The NVIDIA H300 is a rumored/upcoming GPU in the Hopper family, positioned between H200 and Blackwell B200. Currently, H100 (80GB HBM3, 3.35 TB/s) and H200 (141GB HBM3e, 4.8 TB/s) are the production GPUs for Kubernetes AI workloads. Deploy them with GPU Operator + Node Feature Discovery, request via nvidia.com/gpu: 1, and use MIG or time-slicing for multi-tenant sharing.

The Problem

Choosing the right NVIDIA GPU for Kubernetes AI workloads requires understanding:

• Memory capacity limits (model fits in VRAM?)
• Memory bandwidth (inference tokens/s)
• Interconnect topology (NVLink, NVSwitch for multi-GPU)
• Cost vs performance trade-offs
• Kubernetes scheduling and resource management

The Solution

NVIDIA GPU Comparison Matrix

Deploy GPUs on Kubernetes

# 1. Install Node Feature Discovery
helm install nfd nvidia/node-feature-discovery \
  -n gpu-operator --create-namespace

# 2. Install GPU Operator
helm install gpu-operator nvidia/gpu-operator \
  -n gpu-operator \
  --set driver.enabled=true \
  --set toolkit.enabled=true \
  --set devicePlugin.enabled=true \
  --set mig.strategy=single

# 3. Verify GPU nodes
kubectl get nodes -l nvidia.com/gpu.present=true
kubectl describe node gpu-node-1 | grep -A5 "Allocatable:"
#   nvidia.com/gpu: 8

Schedule Pods on Specific GPU Types

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: llm-inference
spec:
  nodeSelector:
    nvidia.com/gpu.product: NVIDIA-H100-SXM5-80GB
  containers:
  - name: inference
    image: nvcr.io/nvidia/pytorch:24.07-py3
    resources:
      limits:
        nvidia.com/gpu: 1
      requests:
        cpu: "4"
        memory: 32Gi

# List available GPU types in cluster
kubectl get nodes -o jsonpath='{range .items[*]}{.metadata.labels.nvidia\.com/gpu\.product}{"\n"}{end}' | sort -u
# NVIDIA-A100-SXM4-80GB
# NVIDIA-H100-SXM5-80GB
# NVIDIA-H200-SXM-141GB

Model-to-GPU Sizing Guide

Memory Bandwidth Impact on Inference

Inference tokens/s ≈ Memory_BW / (2 × Params_in_bytes)

Llama 70B FP16 on different GPUs:
- A100 80GB:  2000 GB/s / (2 × 140GB) = ~7 tok/s per GPU
- H100 SXM:   3350 GB/s / (2 × 140GB) = ~12 tok/s per GPU  
- H200 SXM:   4800 GB/s / (2 × 140GB) = ~17 tok/s per GPU
- B200:       8000 GB/s / (2 × 140GB) = ~29 tok/s per GPU

For batch inference, compute (TFLOPS) becomes the bottleneck instead.

Multi-GPU Tensor Parallelism

# Deploy 70B model across 2× H100 with tensor parallelism
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: llm-70b
spec:
  replicas: 1
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: vllm
        image: vllm/vllm-openai:latest
        args:
        - --model=meta-llama/Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct
        - --tensor-parallel-size=2
        - --gpu-memory-utilization=0.95
        resources:
          limits:
            nvidia.com/gpu: 2        # 2 GPUs with NVLink
        ports:
        - containerPort: 8000

Common Issues

“CUDA out of memory” on model load

Model doesn’t fit in GPU VRAM. Use quantization (INT4/INT8) or increase tensor parallelism across more GPUs.

NVLink not detected between GPUs

GPUs must be on the same NVSwitch fabric (SXM form factor). PCIe GPUs use slower PCIe interconnect. Check: nvidia-smi topo -m.

GPU Operator not detecting GPUs

Check node labels: kubectl get node <node> -o yaml | grep nvidia. Ensure GPU drivers match container CUDA version.

Best Practices

• H100 SXM for training — highest compute with NVLink bandwidth
• H200 for inference — 141GB VRAM fits larger models without TP
• Use MIG on H100 for multi-tenant inference workloads
• Pin GPU type with nodeSelector — prevent scheduling on wrong GPU
• Size VRAM for FP16 model + 20% KV cache overhead

Key Takeaways

• H100 (80GB, 3.35TB/s) is the current training standard, H200 (141GB, 4.8TB/s) is best for large model inference
• Memory bandwidth determines inference throughput, TFLOPS determines training speed
• Use nvidia.com/gpu.product label selector to target specific GPU types
• Model size in FP16 bytes × 1.2 (KV cache) = minimum VRAM needed
• Tensor parallelism across NVLink-connected GPUs for models exceeding single GPU VRAM