Casper

The Casper cluster is a new, heterogeneous system of specialized data analysis and visualization resources and large-memory, multi-GPU nodes. It is expected to be in production this summer. Casper is the successor to the Geyser and Caldera clusters, which have been in service since 2012 and will be decommissioned by the end of 2018.

NCAR's new Casper system, procured from PCPC Direct, Ltd., consists of a total of 24 Supermicro nodes featuring Intel Skylake processors.

• 20 Supermicro SuperWorkstation nodes will be used for data analysis and visualization jobs. Each node has 36 cores and 384 GB of memory. Eight of the 20 nodes also feature an NVIDIA GPU.
• 4 additional nodes feature large-memory, dense GPU configurations to support explorations in machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) in atmospheric and related sciences. Users who are interested in these areas are encouraged to contact cislhelp@ucar.edu to get access.

See the hardware table below for more detailed specifications.

Job scheduler: Users will run jobs on the Casper cluster by logging in to Cheyenne and submitting them with the Slurm Workload Manager.

Operating system: CentOS 7

Hardware