[D] - 1M tokens/second serving Qwen 3.5 27B on B200 GPUs, benchmark results and findings

Reddit r/MachineLearning / 3/27/2026

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Key Points

  • The article reports successful deployment and benchmarking of Qwen 3.5 27B (dense, FP8) reaching 1.1M total tokens/sec using vLLM v0.18.0 across 96 NVIDIA B200 GPUs on GKE.
  • It finds that data parallelism (DP=8) nearly quadrupled throughput compared with using tensor parallelism (TP=8), concluding the model is too small for TP to provide benefit on B200.
  • Results show strong multi-node scaling efficiency (97.1% at 8 nodes and 96.5% at 12) with TPOT remaining roughly constant (~46ms) as nodes increase.
  • The author highlights that enabling MTP-1 was critical for GPU utilization (0% without it), while MTP-5 caused a cudaErrorIllegalAddress crash.
  • It notes that KV-cache-aware routing via Google’s Inference Gateway adds ~35% overhead versus round-robin ClusterIP, and that a single EPP pod becomes the throughput bottleneck under the tested worst-case workload (no prefix cache hits).

Wrote up the process of pushing Qwen 3.5 27B (dense, FP8) to 1.1M total tok/s on 96 B200 GPUs with vLLM v0.18.0.

  • DP=8 nearly 4x'd throughput over TP=8. Model is too small for tensor parallelism to help on B200s.
  • MTP-1 mattered more than anything else (GPU utilization was 0% without it). MTP-5 crashed with cudaErrorIllegalAddress.
  • 97.1% scaling efficiency at 8 nodes, 96.5% at 12. TPOT flat at ~46ms regardless of node count.
  • Inference Gateway (KV-cache-aware routing) added ~35% overhead vs ClusterIP round-robin. Single EPP pod is the bottleneck.

InferenceMAX methodology, input-len=1024, output-len=512, 0% prefix cache hit. Worst-case numbers.

https://medium.com/google-cloud/1-million-tokens-per-second-qwen-3-5-27b-on-gke-with-b200-gpus-161da5c1b592

disclosure: I work for Google Cloud.

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