Prospective Participants

There is no fee and no formal application for ClusterMAX testing.

The ClusterMAX rating is a reflection of what we are able to test. Experience with current-generation hardware and performant networking and storage is an important consideration in our rating. However, we work with whatever a provider has available.

We request:

• Compute: 16 nodes of HGX B300 or MI355X, or 1 rack (18 nodes) of GB300 NVL72. Any provider without current-generation hardware is ineligible for Silver.
• Networking: Performant scale-out fabric, whether RoCE or InfiniBand. This means 800 Gbit/s for Nvidia and 400 Gbit/s for AMD.
• Orchestration: Managed Slurm, managed Kubernetes, or both. We require at least 5 days on each platform. In the case of Slurm on Kubernetes, we test the Slurm and Kubernetes layers simultaneously. In the case of separate Slurm and Kubernetes, this means a minimum of 10 days for testing.
• Tenancy: The cluster must initially be provisioned under two separate tenants to verify tenant isolation. Once this is complete, the cluster must be reprovisioned under a single tenant.
• Shared filesystem: 10 TB of performant shared file storage, regardless of vendor.
• Object storage: 10 TB of S3-compatible object storage.

Testing takes 5–14 days, in which we correspond with the team to understand product decisions, call out issues, and evaluate response times.

To the greatest extent possible, we would like to recreate the experience of a paying customer in terms of configuration, provisioning, and support.

Testing is ongoing. We request a week of lead time to plan, but we are able to accommodate shorter notice.

The tentative deadline for ClusterMAX 3.1 is December 1, 2026. The tentative schedule for ClusterMAX 4.0 is early–mid 2027.

We strongly prefer a shared Slack Connect channel to send feedback, but email or Google Chat suffices if Slack Connect is not an option.

Onboarding calls are sometimes helpful but not required.

Our findings are constantly communicated as we test, and our results are shared before publication.

Email [email protected] with:

1. The hardware, location, and orchestration you can offer, and when it is available for testing.
2. The link to a Slack Connect invitation.
3. A response to each item in our Criteria and Expectations, briefly, in the form of a spreadsheet, with links to documentation where possible.