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Hardware Overview

The Future Technologies Partition is currently split into two different cluster installations with different hardware components, different cluster management software stacks and different login nodes.

FTP is a distributed memory parallel computer consisting of multiple individual servers called "nodes". Nodes are divided into two clusters, one supports ARM instruction set and the other supports x86. Each node has either two Intel Xeon processors or up to two ARM processors, at least 32 GB of local memory, local NVMe or SATA SSD disks and two high-performance network adapters. All nodes are connected by an extremely fast, low-latency InfiniBand 4X HDR interconnect. In addition two large parallel file systems are connected to FTP.

The operating system installed on every node is Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.x. On top of this operating system, a set of (open source) software components like Slurm has been installed. Some of these components are of special interest to end users and are briefly discussed here. Others are mostly just of importance to system administrators and are thus not covered by this documentation.

The different server systems in FTP have different roles and offer different services.

Login Nodes

The login nodes are the only nodes directly accessible to end users. These nodes can be used for interactive logins, file management, software development and interactive pre- and postprocessing. Two nodes are dedicated as login nodes.

Compute Nodes

The majority of the nodes are dedicated to computations. These nodes are not directly accessible to users. Instead the calculations have to be submitted to a so-called batch system. The batch system manages all compute nodes and executes the queued jobs depending on their priority and as soon as the required resources become available. A single job may use hundreds of compute nodes and many thousand CPU cores at once.

FTP-A64 ARM cluster

Login node
Login node
No. Nodes 1
CPU 1x Ampere Altra Q80-33
Total Cores 80
CPU Clock 3.3 GHz
Instruction Set ARMv8.2+
Memory 512 GiB
Accelerator Type -
No. Accelerators -
Disk (useable) 890 GB
Disk type SATA-SSD
InfiniBand 200 GBit/s BlueField 2
Ampere Altra CPU
ARM-A100 Dual Socket ARM Altra Max
No. Nodes 4 6
CPU 1x Ampere Altra Q80-33 2x Ampere Altra Max M128-30
Total Cores 80 256
CPU Clock 3.3 GHz 3 GHz
Instruction Set ARMv8.2+ ARMv8.2+
Memory 512 GiB 512 GiB
Accelerator Type NVIDIA A100 PCIe 40GB -
No. Accelerators 2 -
Disk (useable) 890 GB 1.8 TB
Disk type SATA-SSD SATA-SSD
InfiniBand 200 GBit/s BlueField 2 200 GBit/s ConnectX-6
Fujitsu CPU
A64FX nodes
No. Nodes 8
CPU 1x Fujitsu A64FX
Total Cores 48
CPU Clock 1.8 GHz
Instruction Set ARMv8.2-A + SVE
Memory 32 GiB
Accelerator Type -
No. Accelerators -
Disk (useable) 372 GB
Disk type NVMe
InfiniBand 100GBit/s ConnectX-6
NVIDIA Superchips
Grace-Grace Grace-Hopper
No. Nodes 6 2
CPU 2x Grace CPU Superchip 1x Grace CPU Superchip
Total Cores 144 72
CPU Clock 3.4 GHz 3.1 GHz
Instruction Set ARMv9 + SVE2 ARMv9 + SVE2
Memory 480GB 480GB
Accelerator Type - GH200
No. Accelerators - 1
Disk (useable) 3.8 TB 1.92 TB
Disk type NVMe NVMe
InfiniBand 200 GBit/s ConnectX-6 200 GBit/s ConnectX-6

FTP-X86 cluster

Login node
Login node
No. Nodes 1
CPU 2x Intel Xeon Gold 6230
Sockets 2
Total Cores 40
Total Threads 40
CPU Base Clock 2.1 GHz
Instruction Set x86_64
Memory 192 GB
Accelerator type -
No. Accelerators -
Accelerator TFLOPS (FP64) -
Accelerator TFLOPS (FP32) -
Accelerator TFLOPS (FP16) -
Accelerator Mem b/w (GB/s) -
Disk 890GB
Disk type NVMe
Graphcore Accelerators
AMD EPYC Milan + Graphcore
No. Nodes 1
CPU 2x AMD EPYC 7543
Sockets 2
Total Cores 64
Total Threads 128
CPU Base Clock 2.8 GHz
Instruction Set x86_64
Memory 512 GB
Accelerator type Graphcore IPU-M2000
No. Accelerators 4 (=16 IPUs)
Accelerator TFLOPS (FP64) -
Accelerator TFLOPS (FP32) -
Accelerator TFLOPS (FP16) 250
Accelerator Mem b/w (GB/s)
Disk 3 TB
Disk type NVMe
AMD Instinct Accelerators
AMD EPYC Milan + MI100 AMD EPYC Milan + MI210 AMD EPYC Milan + MI250
No. Nodes 1 1 2
CPU 2x AMD EPYC 7543 2x AMD EPYC 7543 2x AMD EPYC 7713
Sockets 2 2 2
Total Cores 64 64 128
Total Threads 128 128 128
CPU Base Clock 2.8 GHz 2.8 GHz 2.0 GHz
Instruction Set x86_64 x86_64 x86_64
Memory 512 GB 512 GB 1 TB
Accelerator type AMD MI100 AMD MI210 AMD MI250
No. Accelerators 4 4 4
Accelerator TFLOPS (FP64) 11,5 22,6 45,3
Accelerator TFLOPS (FP32) 23 22,6 45,3
Accelerator TFLOPS (FP16) 184,6 181 362,1
Accelerator Mem b/w (GB/s) 1228 1600 3276
Disk 3 TB 3 TB 1.8 TB
Disk type NVMe NVMe NVMe
AMD Instinct MI300A APU
AMD Instinct MI300A Accelerators
No. Nodes 1
CPU 4x AMD Instinct MI300A Accelerator (Zen4)
Sockets 4
Total Cores 96
Total Threads 192
CPU Base Clock
Instruction Set x86_64
Memory 512 GB
Accelerator type Instinct MI300A
No. Accelerators 4
Accelerator TFLOPS (FP64) 61,3
Accelerator TFLOPS (FP32) 122,6
Accelerator TFLOPS (FP16) 980,6
Accelerator Mem b/w (GB/s) 5300
Disk 29 TB
Disk type NVMe
Intel Sapphire Rapids CPU
Intel Sapphire Rapids Intel Sapphire Rapids + HBM
No. Nodes 2 2
CPU 2x Intel Xeon Platinum 8480+ 2x Intel Xeon CPU Max 9470
Sockets 2 2
Total Cores 112 104
Total Threads 224 208
CPU Base Clock 3.8 GHz 3.5 GHz
Instruction Set x86_64 x86_64
Memory 512 GB 640 GB
Accelerator type - -
No. Accelerators - -
Accelerator TFLOPS (FP64) - -
Accelerator TFLOPS (FP32) - -
Accelerator TFLOPS (FP16) - -
Accelerator Mem b/w (GB/s) - -
Disk 890GB 890 GB
Disk type NVMe NVMe
Intel Ponte Vecchio Accelerator
Intel Sapphire Rapids + Ponte Vecchio
No. Nodes 1
CPU 2x Intel Xeon Platinum 8460Y+
Sockets 2
Total Cores 80
Total Threads 160
CPU Base Clock 3.7 GHz
Instruction Set x86_64
Memory 512 GB
Accelerator type Intel Ponte Vecchio XT
No. Accelerators 4
Accelerator TFLOPS (FP64) 52
Accelerator TFLOPS (FP32) 52
Accelerator TFLOPS (FP16) 52
Accelerator Mem b/w (GB/s) 3276
Disk 890 GB
Disk type NVMe
Intel Gaudi 2 AI Accelerator
Intel Gaudi 2 AI Accelerator
No. Nodes 3
CPU 2x Intel Xeon Platinum 8360Y
Sockets 2
Total Cores 72
Total Threads 144
CPU Base Clock 2.4 GHz
Instruction Set x86_64
Memory 1024 GB
Accelerator type Intel Gaudi 2
No. Accelerators 8
Accelerator TFLOPS (FP64) -
Accelerator TFLOPS (FP32) -
Accelerator TFLOPS (FP16) -
Accelerator Mem b/w (GB/s) -
Disk 1.8TB
Disk type NVMe

Interconnect

An important component of FTP is the InfiniBand 4x HDR 200 GBit/s interconnect. All nodes are attached to this high-throughput, very low-latency (~ 1 microsecond) network. InfiniBand is ideal for communication intensive applications and applications that e.g. perform a lot of collective MPI communications.