Helix/Hardware
System Architecture
The bwForCluster Helix is a high performance supercomputer with high speed interconnect. Is composed of login nodes, compute nodes and parallel storage systems connected by fast data networks. It is connected to the Internet via Baden Württemberg's extended LAN BelWü.
Operating System and Software
- Operating system: RedHat
- Queuing system: Slurm
- Access to application software: Environment Modules
Compute Nodes
AMD Nodes
| CPU Nodes | GPU Nodes | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Node Type | cpu | fat | colspan="2" style="text-align:center" gpu4 | gpu8 | |
| Architecture | Haswell | Haswell | Sky Lake | Cascade Lake | Haswell |
| Quantity | 476 | 164 | 24 | 5 | 4 |
| Processors | 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2630v3 | 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2640v3 | 2 x Intel Xeon Gold 6130 | 2 x Intel Xeon Gold 6230 | 4 x Intel Xeon E5-4620v3 |
| Processor Frequency (GHz) | 2.4 | 2.6 | 2.1 | 2.1 | 2.0 |
| Number of Cores | 16 | 16 | 32 | 40 | 40 |
| Working Memory (GB) | 64 | 128 | 192 | 384 | 1536 |
| Local Disk (GB) | 128 (SSD) | 128 (SSD) | 512 (SSD) | 480 (SSD) | 9000 (SATA) |
| Interconnect | QDR | FDR | EDR | EDR | FDR |
Intel Nodes
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 requirements of the configuration.