Helix/Hardware

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System Architecture

The bwForCluster Helix is a high performance supercomputer with high speed interconnect. The system consists of compute nodes (CPU and GPU nodes), some infrastructure nodes for login and administration and a storage system. All components are connected via a fast Infiniband network. The login nodes are also connected to the Internet via Baden Württemberg's extended LAN BelWü.

Helix-skizze.png

Operating System and Software

  • Operating system: RedHat
  • Queuing system: Slurm
  • Access to application software: Environment Modules

Compute Nodes

AMD Nodes

Common features of all AMD nodes:

  • Processors: 2 x AMD Milan EPYC 7513
  • Processor Frequency: 2.6 GHz
  • Number of Cores per Node: 64
  • Local disk: None
CPU Nodes GPU Nodes
Node Type cpu fat gpu4 gpu4 gpu8
Quantity 355 15 29 26 4
Installed Working Memory (GB) 256 2048 256 256 2048
Available Memory for Jobs (GB) 236 2010 236 236 2010
Interconnect 1x HDR100 1x HDR100 2x HDR100 2x HDR200 4x HDR200
Coprocessors - - 4x Nvidia A40 (48 GB) 4x Nvidia A100 (40 GB) 8x Nvidia A100 (80 GB)
Number of GPUs - - 4 4 8
GPU Type - - A40 A100 A100

The lines marked in blue are in particular relevant for Slurm jobs.

Intel Nodes

Some Intel nodes (Skylake and Cascade Lake) from the predecessor system will be integrated. Details will follow.


Storage Architecture

There is one storage system providing a large parallel file system based on IBM Spectrum Scale for $HOME, for workspaces, and for temporary job data.

Network

The components of the cluster are connected via two independent networks, a management network (Ethernet and IPMI) and an Infiniband fabric for MPI communication and storage access. The Infiniband backbone is a fully non-blocking fabric with 200 Gb/s data speed. The compute nodes are connected with different data speeds according to the node configuration. The term HDR100 stands for 100 Gb/s and HDR200 for 200 Gb/s.