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Casper

The Casper cluster is a heterogeneous system of specialized data analysis and visualization resources and large-memory, multi-GPU nodes. Casper is the successor to the Geyser and Caldera clusters, which were decommissioned at the end of 2018.

NCAR's Casper system, procured from PCPC Direct, Ltd., comprises 28 Supermicro nodes featuring Intel Skylake processors.

  • 20 Supermicro SuperWorkstation nodes are used for data analysis and visualization jobs. Each node has 36 cores and up to 384 GB of memory. Eight of the nodes also feature an NVIDIA GPU.
  • 6 additional nodes feature large-memory, dense GPU configurations to support explorations in machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) in atmospheric and related sciences.
  • 2 are login nodes.

See the hardware table below for more detailed specifications.

Job scheduler: Users submit jobs with the Slurm Workload Manager to run them on the Casper cluster.

Operating system: CentOS 7

Hardware

Data Analysis & Visualization nodes

 20 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
Mellanox VPI EDR InfiniBand dual-port interconnect
(one port configured for FDR and one as 100 GbE)
Intel 10 Gb dual-port Ethernet
1 NVIDIA QuadroGP100 GPU on each of 8 nodes

Machine Learning/Deep Learning nodes

 2 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 TB local NVMe Solid State Disk
Mellanox VPI EDR InfiniBand dual-port interconnect
(one port configured for FDR and one as 100 GbE)
Intel 10 Gb dual-port Ethernet
4 NVIDIA Tesla V100 SXM2 GPUs with NVLink

4 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
Mellanox VPI EDR InfiniBand dual-port interconnect
(one port configured for FDR and one as 100 GbE)
Intel 10 Gb dual-port Ethernet
8 NVIDIA Tesla V100 SXM2 GPUs with NVLink