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Hardware

Grace: A Dell x86 HPC Cluster

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System Name:

Grace

Host Name:

grace.hprc.tamu.edu

Operating System:

Linux (CentOS 7)

Total Compute Cores/Nodes:

45,376 cores
940 nodes

Compute Nodes:

800 48-core compute nodes, each with 384GB RAM
100 48-core GPU nodes, each with two A100 40GB GPUs and 384GB RAM
9 48-core GPU nodes, each with two RTX 6000 24GB GPUs and 384GB RAM
8 48-core GPU nodes, each with 4 T4 16GB GPUs
15 48-core GPU nodes, each with two A40 48GB GPUs and 384GB RAM
8 80-core large memory nodes, each with 3TB RAM

Interconnect:

Mellanox HDR 100 InfiniBand

Peak Performance:

6.3 PFLOPS

Global Disk:

5PB (usable) via DDN Lustre appliances for general use
1.4PB (usable) via Lenovo DSS GPFS appliance (purchased by and dedicated for Dr. Junjie Zhang's CryoEM Lab)
1.9PB (usable) via Lenovo DSS GPFS appliance (purchased by and dedicated for Dr. Ping Chang's iHESP Lab)

File System:

Lustre and GPFS

Batch Facility:

Slurm by SchedMD

Location:

West Campus Data Center

Production Date:

Spring 2021

Grace is an Intel x86-64 Linux cluster with 940 compute nodes (45,376 total cores) and 5 login nodes. There are 800 compute nodes with 384 GB of memory, and 132 GPU nodes with 384 GB of memory. Among the 117 GPU nodes, there are 100 GPU nodes two A100 40 GB GPU cards, 9 GPU nodes with two RTX 6000 24GB GPU cards, 8 GPU nodes with four T4 16GB GPU cards, and 15 GPU nodes with two A40 48GB GPUs. These 800 compute nodes and 117 GPU nodes are a dual socket server with two Intel 6248R 3.0GHz 24-core processors, commonly known as Cascade Lake. There are 8 compute nodes with 3 TB of memory and four Intel 6248 2.5 GHz 20-core processors.

The interconnecting fabric is a two-level fat-tree based on HDR 100 InfiniBand.

High performance mass storage of 5 petabyte (usable) capacity is made available to all nodes by the DDN Lustre storage. Also, 3.3 PB of Lenovo DSS GPFS storage is for their respective research labs.

Get details on using this system, see the User Guide for Grace.

Compute Nodes

A description of the four types of compute nodes is below:

Table 1 Details of Compute Nodes

General 384GB
Compute

GPU A100
Compute

GPU RTX 6000
Compute

GPU T4
Compute

GPU A40
Compute

Large Memory 3TB
Compute

Total Nodes

800

100

9

8

15

8

Processor Type

Intel Xeon 6248R (Cascade Lake), 3.0GHz, 24-core

Intel Xeon 6248 (Cascade Lake), 2.5 GHz, 20-core

Sockets/Node

2

4

Cores/Node

48

80

Memory/Node

384GB DDR4, 3200 MHz

3TB DDR4, 3200 MHz

Accelerator(s)

N/A

2 NVIDIA A100 40GB GPU

2 NVIDIA RTX 6000 24GB GPU

4 NVIDIA T4 16GB GPU

2 NVIDIA A40 48GB GPU

N/A

Interconnect

Mellanox HDR100 InfiniBand

Local Disk Space

1.6TB NVMe (/tmp), 480GB SSD

Usable Memory for Batch Jobs

While nodes on Grace have either 384GB or 3TB of RAM, some of this memory is used to maintain the software and operating system of the node. In most cases, excessive memory requests will be automatically rejected by SLURM.

The table below contains information regarding the approximate limits of Grace memory hardware and our suggestions on its use.

Memory Limits of Nodes

384GB Nodes (Regular and GPU)

3TB Nodes

Node Count

917

8

Number of Cores

48 Cores

80 Cores

Memory Limit
Per Core

7500 MB
~7.5 GB

37120 MB
36.25 GB

Memory Limit
Per Node

368640 MB
360 GB

2969600 MB
2900 GB

Login Nodes

The grace.hprc.tamu.edu hostname can be used to access the Grace cluster. This translates into one of the five login nodes, grace[1-5].hprc.tamu.edu. To access a specific login node use its corresponding host name (e.g., grace2.hprc.tamu.edu). All login nodes have 10 GbE connections to the TAMU campus network and direct access to all global parallel (Lustre-based) file systems. The table below provides more details about the hardware configuration of the login nodes.

Table 2: Details of Login Nodes

NVIDIA A100 GPU

NVIDIA RTX 6000 GPU

NVIDIA T4 GPU

No GPU

Hostnames

grace1.hprc.tamu.edu

grace2.hprc.tamu.edu

grace3.hprc.tamu.edu

grace4.hprc.tamu.edu
grace5.hprc.tamu.edu

Processor Type

Intel Xeon 6248R 3.0GHz 24-core

Memory

384GB DDR4 3200 MHz

Total Nodes

1

1

1

2

Cores/Node

48

Interconnect

Mellanox HDR100 InfiniBand

Local Disk Space

per node: two 480 GB SSD drives, 1.6 TB NVMe

Mass Storage

  • 5PB (usable) with Lustre provided by DDN ES200NV appliance and two ES7990X appliances
  • 1.4PB (usable) with GPFS provided by Lenovo's DSS-G220 appliance
  • 1.9PB (usable) with GPFS provided by Lenovo's DSS-G230 appliance

Interconnect

Two level fat tree topology with Mellanox HDR100:

  • There are 5 core switches and 11 leaf switches.
  • Each leaf switch has 2 Mellanox HDR InfiniBand (200Gb/s) uplinks to each core switch.
  • There are up to 80 compute nodes attached to each leaf switch.
  • Each login or compute node has a single Mellanox HDR100 InfiniBand (100Gb/s) link to a leaf switch.
  • The DDN storage has 12 total HDR100 links.
  • The Lenovo DSS-G220 storage (Dr. Junjie Zhang's CryoEM Lab) has 8 HDR100 links.
  • The Lenovo DSS-G230 storage (Dr. Ping Chang's iHESP Lab) has 8 EDR links (100Gb/s).

Namesake

"Grace" is named for Grace Hopper.