NEC Cluster Hardware and Architecture (vulcan)

Hardware

The list of currently available hardware can be found here.

Architecture

The NEC Cluster platform (vulcan) consists of several frontend nodes for interactive access (for access details see Access) and several compute nodes of different types for execution of parallel programs. Some parts of the compute nodes comes from the old NEC Cluster laki.

Compute node types installed:

• Intel Xeon Broadwell, Skylake, CascadeLake
• AMD Epyc Rome, Genoa
• different Memory sizes (256GB, 384GB, 512GB, 768GB)
• Pre-Postprocessing node with very large memory (1.5TB, 3TB)
• Visualisation/GPU nodes with AMD Radeon Pro WX8200, Nvidia Quadro RTX4000 or Nvidia A30

• Vector nodes with NEC Aurora TSUBASA CPUs

Features

• Operating System: Rocky Linux 8
• Batchsystem: PBSPro
• node-node interconnect: Infiniband + 10G Ethernet
• Global Disk 2.2 PB (lustre) for vulcan + 500TB (lustre) for vulcan2
• Many Software Packages for Development

History

Warning: Hardware Upgrade took place on 2024-05-24
Some of the compute nodes and network infrastructure of vulcan has been replaced by up to date hardware.

Replacement Overview:

node_type	historical node number	current node number
aurora	8	8
clx-21	8	8
clx-25	96	96
clx-ai	4	0
hsw128gb20c	84	0
hsw128gb24c	152	0
hsw256gb20c	4	0
hsw256gb24c	16	0
k20xm	3	0
p100	3	3
skl	68	72
smp	2	1
visamd	6	6
visnv	2	2
visp100	10	0
rome256gb32c	3	3 (1)(2)
rome512gb96c-ai	10	10 (1)(3)
genoa	0	60 (4)(5)
genoa-a30	0	24 (4)(6)
genoa-smp	0	2 (4)(7)

^{(1) academic usage only
(2) 2x AMD Epic 7302 Rome, 3.0GHz base, 32 cores total, 256GB DDR4, 3.5TB NVMe
(3) 2x AMD Epyc 7642 Rome, 2.3GHz base, 96 cores total, 512GB DDR4, 1.8TB NVMe, 8x AMD Instinct Mi50 with 32GB
(4) new nodes, node_type not yet fixed
(5) 2x AMD Epyc 9334 Genoa, 2.7GHz base, 64 cores total, 768GB DDR5
(6) 2x AMD Epyc 9124 Genoa, 3.0GHz base, 32 cores total, 768GB DDR5, 3.8TB NVMe, 1x Nvidia A30 with 24GB HBM2e
(7) 2x AMD Epyc 9334 Genoa, 2.7GHz base, 64 cores total, 3072GB DDR5}