AI Fabric Sizing Calculator
Given a GPU deployment target: leaf/spine switch counts, explicit port accounting, an optics and cable BOM, and a fabric power estimate.
Scope — scale-out fabric only. This tool sizes the backend scale-out fabric (leaf/spine RoCE Ethernet or InfiniBand between servers). The scale-up/intra-node interconnect (NVLink, Infinity Fabric, UALink, Scale-Up Ethernet) is an input assumption — it determines NICs per server via the platform preset — and is never itself sized here.
Try a worked example:1,024 × H100, rail-optimizedsame cluster, spineless (rail-only)256 × MI300X8,192 GPUs on Tomahawk 616,384 GPUs at the 2-tier limit512-GPU disaggregated inference
Topology summary
Switches & port accounting
Every port is accounted for — downlink, uplink, or unused. Cages are physical connectors at native speed; links may be finer-grained via breakout.
Bill of materials
How it's computed — the conventions behind the numbers
- Leaf split: downlinks are maximized against the cage budget —
ceil(D/f_down) + ceil(U/f_up) ≤ cages, where breakout factors let 800G/1.6T cages serve finer-grained links on either side. - Spine count: rounds up to the smallest divisor of uplinks-per-leaf (vendor practice — even ECMP); the honest capacity minimum is available as a mode and warns when ECMP would be uneven.
- Rail placement: small clusters pack multiple complete rails per switch, matching published vendor designs; strict one-rail-per-switch is available as a mode.
- Optics: 2 transceivers per fiber link (both ends counted), 1 cable per DAC link, spares rounded up per line. Media is chosen by reach class; if no sourced record matches, the tool warns instead of guessing.
- Power: switch typical draw (excludes-optics convention, so nothing is double-counted) + per-end optics draw; spares draw nothing.
- Ceilings: 2-tier designs require a full leaf–spine mesh, so the max is spine-radix bound; the tool warns at 80% and refuses to silently clamp beyond it.
Every formula is documented, human-reviewed, and locked by golden tests that reproduce the published reference architectures listed below. Divergences are documented, never silently adjusted.
Feedback
Does this match what you'd build — or what a vendor quoted you? Both answers are useful.Send feedback(your current design's link is included), or useCopy shareable link above to pass the exact design to a colleague.
Validated against
The calculation engine reproduces the switch and cable counts of these published documents (pinned revisions) in its automated test suite. Divergences are documented, never silently adjusted.
- NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD H100 Reference Architecture — Page footer: Last updated on Nov 19, 2025
- NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD H200 Reference Architecture — Page footer: Last updated on Nov 19, 2025
- NVIDIA Quantum-2 (QM9700) product page — checked 2026-07-09
- Cisco Data Center Networking Blueprint for AI/ML Applications — Wayback Machine snapshot, 2026-04-15
- Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric Cloud RA with HGX H200 (1K-32K GPUs) — Wayback Machine snapshot, 2026-04-14
- Asterfusion GPU Backend Fabric Design Guide for AI Compute Network — Live page as fetched 2026-07-09
- Wang et al., 'Rail-only: A Low-Cost High-Performance Network for Training LLMs with Trillion Parameters' (arXiv 2307.12169) — arXiv v5 (2024-09-15), cross-checked against the published HOTI 2024 PDF
- AI Data Center Network with Juniper Apstra, Nvidia GPUs, ConnectX NIC, and Weka Storage—Juniper Validated Design (JVD) — Full document as of 2026-07-09 (index page exposes no revision id)
- AI Data Center Network with Juniper Apstra, AMD GPUs, Broadcom Thor2 NIC, AMD Pollara NIC, and Vast Storage—Juniper Validated Design (JVD) — Sub-documents as of 2026-07-08; full document as of 2026-07-09 (no revision id exposed)
- AI Data Center Frontend Fabric for Inference with HPE Juniper QFX switches, Apstra Data Center Director, and AMD Instinct MI300X GPUs—Juniper Validated Design (JVD) — Revision JVD-AIDC-INFERENCE-01-01, published 2026-06-12 (initial)
- NVIDIA HGX AI Factory (NVIDIA Enterprise Reference Architecture, HGX B300 class) — Last updated May 18, 2026 (date-only pinning; no version number exposed)
- HPE Juniper Networking QFX5250 Switch Series data sheet (doc a00159794ENW) — Doc a00159794ENW Rev. 1 (copyright 2026)