Hardware

FASTER: A Dell x86 HPC Cluster

System Name:	FASTER
Host Name:	faster.hprc.tamu.edu
Operating System:	Rocky Linux 8
Total Compute Cores/Nodes:	11,520 cores 180 nodes
Compute Nodes:	180 64-core compute nodes, each with 256GB RAM
Composable GPUs:	200 T4 16GB GPUs 40 A100 40GB GPUs 8 A10 24GB GPUs 4 A30 24GB GPUs 8 A40 48GB GPUs
Interconnect:	Mellanox HDR100 InfiniBand (MPI and storage) Liqid PCIe Gen4 (GPU composability)
Peak Performance:	1.2 PFLOPS
Global Disk:	5PB (usable) via DDN Lustre appliances
File System:	Lustre
Batch Facility:	Slurm by SchedMD
Location:	West Campus Data Center
Production Date:	2021

FASTER is a 184-node Intel cluster from Dell with an InfiniBand HDR-100 interconnect. A100 GPUs, A10 GPUs, A30 GPUs, A40 GPUs and T4 GPUs are distributed and composable via Liqid PCIe fabrics. All login and compute nodes are based on the Intel Xeon 8352Y Ice Lake processor.

Compute Nodes

Table 2: Details of Compute Nodes

	Compute Nodes
Processor Type	Intel Xeon 8352Y (Ice Lake)
Sockets per node	2
Cores per socket	32
Cores per Node	64
Hardware threads per core	2
Hardware threads per node	128
Clock rate	2.20GHz (3.40 GHz Max Turbo Frequency)
Memory	256 GB DDR4-3200
Cache	48 MB L3
Local Disk Space	3.84 TB NVMe (/tmp)

GPUs can be added to compute nodes on the fly by using the “gres” option in a Slurm script. A researcher can request up to 10 GPUs to create these CPU-GPU nodes. The following GPUs will be composable to the compute nodes.

• 200 T4 16GB GPUs
• 40 A100 40GB GPUs
• 8 A10 24GB GPUs
• 4 A30 24GB GPUs
• 8 A40 48GB GPUs

Login Nodes

Table 3: Details of Login Nodes

	Login Nodes
Hostnames	faster1.hprc.tamu.edu (TAMU) faster2.hprc.tamu.edu (TAMU) faster3.hprc.tamu.edu (ACCESS)
Processor Type	Intel Xeon 8352Y (Ice Lake)
Memory	256 GB DDR4-3200
Total Nodes	4
Cores/Node	64
Interconnect	InfiniBand HDR100
Local Disk Space	3.84 TB (/tmp)

Data Transfer Nodes

FASTER has two data transfer nodes that can be used to transfer data to FASTER via the Globus Connect web interface or Globus command line. Globus Connect Server v5.4 is installed on the data transfer nodes. One data transfer node is dedicated to XSEDE users and its collection is listed as “XSEDE TAMU FASTER”.