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Casper

Updated 10/19/2020: This page was revised to reflect the addition of nodes to the Casper cluster.

The Casper cluster is a heterogeneous system of specialized data analysis and visualization resources and large-memory, multi-GPU nodes. 

Casper is composed of 36 Supermicro nodes featuring Intel Skylake or Cascade Lake processors.

  • 22 Supermicro SuperWorkstation nodes are used for data analysis and visualization jobs. Each node has 36 cores and up to 384 GB memory.
  • 10 nodes feature large-memory, dense GPU configurations to support explorations in machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) and general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) computing in atmospheric and related sciences.
  • 4 nodes are reserved for Research Data Archive workflows.

See the hardware summary table below for detailed specifications.

Job scheduler: Users submit jobs to run on Casper nodes with the Slurm Workload Manager as documented here.

Operating system: CentOS 7.8

Hardware

Data Analysis
& Visualization nodes

 22 Supermicro 7049GP-TRT SuperWorkstation nodes
Up to 384 GB DDR4-2666 memory per node
2 18-core 2.3-GHz Intel Xeon Gold 6140 (Skylake) processors per node
2 TB local NVMe Solid State Disk
1 Mellanox ConnectX-4 100Gb Ethernet connection (GLADE, Campaign Storage, external connectivity)
1 Mellanox ConnectX-6 HDR100 InfiniBand link
1 NVIDIA Quadro GP100 GPU 16GB PCIe on each of 9 nodes

Machine Learning/Deep Learning 
& General Purpose GPU (GPGPU) nodes

 4 Supermicro SuperServer nodes with 4 V100 GPUs
768 GB DDR4-2666 memory per node
2 18-core 2.3-GHz Intel Xeon Gold 6140 (Skylake) processors per node
2 18-core 2.6-GHz Intel Xeon Gold 6240 (Cascade Lake) processors per node
2 TB local NVMe Solid State Disk
1 Mellanox ConnectX-4 100Gb Ethernet connection (GLADE, Campaign Storage, external connectivity)
2 Mellanox ConnectX-6 HDR200 InfiniBand adapters. HDR100 link on each CPU socket
4 NVIDIA Tesla V100 32GB SXM2 GPUs with NVLink

6 Supermicro SuperServer nodes with 8 V100 GPUs
1152 GB DDR4-2666 memory per node
2 18-core 2.3-GHz Intel Xeon Gold 6140 (Skylake) processors per node
2 TB local NVMe Solid State Disk
1 Mellanox ConnectX-4 100Gb Ethernet connection (GLADE, Campaign Storage, external connectivity)
2 Mellanox ConnectX-6 HDR200 InfiniBand adapters, HDR100 link on each CPU socket
8 NVIDIA Tesla V100 32GB SXM2 GPUs with NVLink

Research Data Archive
nodes (reserved for
RDA use)

 4 Supermicro Workstation nodes
94 GB DDR4-2666 memory per node
2 16-core 2.3-GHz Intel Xeon Gold 5218 (Cascade Lake) processors per node
1.92 TB local Solid State Disk
1 Mellanox ConnectX-6 VPI 100Gb Ethernet connection (GLADE, Campaign Storage, internal connectivity)