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Hardware

Terra: A Lenovo x86 HPC Cluster


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System Name:

Terra

Host Name:

terra.tamu.edu

Operating System:

Linux (CentOS 7)

Total Compute Cores/Nodes:

9,632 cores
320 nodes

Compute Nodes:

256 28-core compute nodes, each with 64GB RAM
48 28-core GPU nodes, each with one dual-GPU Tesla K80 accelerator and 128GB RAM
8 68-core KNL nodes with 96GB RAM
8 72-core KNL nodes with 96GB RAM

Interconnect:

Intel Omni-Path Fabric 100 Series switches.

Peak Performance:

377 TFLOPs

Global Disk:

7PB (raw) via Lenovo's DSS-G260 appliance for general use
1PB (raw) via Lenovo's GSS24 purchased by and dedicated for GEOSAT

File System:

General Parallel File System (GPFS)

Batch Facility:

Slurm by SchedMD

Location:

Teague Data Center

Production Date:

February 2017

Terra is an Intel x86-64 Linux cluster with 320 compute nodes (9,632 total cores) and 3 login nodes. There are 256 compute nodes with 64 GB of memory, 48 compute nodes with 128 GB of memory and a K80 GPU card. These 304 compute nodes are a dual socket server with two Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 2.40GHz 14-core processors, commonly known as Broadwell. There are also 16 Intel Knights Landing (KNL) nodes with 96 GB of memory with either 68 or 72 cores per node.

The interconnecting fabric is a two-level fat-tree based on Intel Omni-Path Architecture (OPA). High performance mass storage of 7.4 petabyte (raw) capacity is made available to all nodes by one Lenovo DSS-G260 storage appliance (added in Fall 2019) and one GSS24 storage appliance (from Fall 2017).

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

Compute Nodes

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

Table 1 Details of Compute Nodes

General 64GB
Compute

GPU 128 GB
Compute

KNL 96 GB (68 core)
Compute

KNL 96 GB (72 core)
Compute

V100 GPU 192 GB
Compute

Total Nodes

256

48

8

8

4

Processor Type

Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 (Broadwell), 2.40GHz, 14-core

Intel Xeon Phi CPU 7250 (Knight's Landing), 1.40GHz, 68-core

Intel Xeon Phi CPU 7290 (Knight's Landing), 1.50GHz, 72-core

Intel Xeon Gold 5118 (Skylake), 12-core, 2.30 GHz

Sockets/Node

2

2

2

2

Cores/Node

28

68

72

24

Memory/Node

64 GB DDR4, 2400 MHz

128 GB DDR4, 2400 MHz

96 GB DDR4, 2400 MHz

192 GB, 2400 MHz

Accelerator(s)

N/A

1 NVIDIA K80 Accelerator

N/A

2 NVIDIA 32GB V100 GPUs

Interconnect

Intel Omni-Path Architecture (OPA)

Intel Omni-Path Architecture (OPA)

Local Disk Space

1TB 7.2K RPM SATA disk

220GB

300GB

Note, each K80 accelerator has two GPUs.

Usable Memory for Batch Jobs

While nodes on Terra have either 64GB or 128GB 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 Terra memory hardware and our suggestions on its use.

Memory Limits of Nodes

64GB Nodes

128GB Nodes

96GB KNL Nodes (68 core)

96GB KNL Nodes (72 core)

Node Count

256

48

8

8

Number of Cores

28 Cores (2 sockets x 14 core)

68 Cores

72 Cores

Memory Limit
Per Core

2048 MB
2 GB

4096 MB
4 GB

1300 MB
1.25 GB

1236 MB
1.20 GB

Memory Limit
Per Node

57344 MB
56 GB

114688 MB
112 GB

89000 MB
84 GB

89000 MB
84 GB

SLURM may queue your job for an excessive time (or indefinitely) if waiting for some particular nodes with sufficient memory to become free.

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Login Nodes

The terra.tamu.edu hostname can be used to access the Terra cluster. This translates into one of the three login nodes, terra[1-3].tamu.edu. To access a specific login node use its corresponding host name (e.g., terra2.tamu.edu). All login nodes have 10 GbE connections to the TAMU campus network and direct access to all global parallel (GPFS-based) file systems. The table below provides more details about the hardware configuration of the login nodes.

Table 2: Details of Login Nodes

No Accelerator

Two NVIDIA K80 Accelerator

HostNames

terra1.tamu.edu
terra2.tamu.edu

terra3.tamu.edu

Processor Type

Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 2.40GHz 14-core

Memory

128 GB DDR4 2400 MHz

Total Nodes

2

1

Cores/Node

28

Interconnect

Intel Omni-Path Architecture (OPA)

Local Disk Space

per node: two 900GB 10K RPM SAS drives

Mass Storage

7PB (raw) via one Lenovo DSS-G260 appliance for general use and 1PB (raw) via Lenovo GSS24 appliance purchased by and dedicated for GEOSAT. All storage appliances use IBM Spectrum Scale (formerly GPFS).

Interconnect

Opa_fabric.png

Namesake

"terra" comes from the Latin word for "this planet" a.k.a. "Earth". One of the purposes of this cluster is to study images gathered from a "Earth Observation Satellite" (EOS). Given that we just retired a cluster named "Eos" (named after the Greek goddess of the dawn waiting to spread the light of knowledge each day), the name terra was chosen instead

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