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Hardware Overview

HAICORE is integrated with HoreKa and consists of 16 individual servers called "nodes". All nodes are connected by an extremely fast, low-latency InfiniBand 4X HDR interconnect.

The operating system installed on every node is Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.x. On top of this operating system, a set of (open source) software components like Slurm has been installed. Some of these components are of special interest to end users and are briefly discussed here. Others are mostly just of importance to system administrators and are thus not covered by this documentation.

One of the CPUs used by HoreKa (Simon Raffeiner, SCC/KIT)

Login Node

The login node is the only nodes directly accessible to end users. This nodes can be used for interactive logins, file management, software development and interactive pre- and postprocessing.

Compute Nodes

Most nodes are dedicated to computations. These nodes are not directly accessible to users, instead the calculations have to be submitted to a so-called batch system. The batch system manages all compute nodes and executes the queued jobs depending on their priority and as soon as the required resources become available.

Administrative Service Nodes

Some nodes provide additional services like resource management, external network connections, monitoring, security etc. These nodes can only be accessed by system administrators.

HAICORE compute node hardware

GPU4 nodes GPU8 nodes
No. of nodes 12 3
CPUs Intel Xeon Platinum 8368 AMD "Rome" EPYC 7742
CPU Sockets per node 2 2
CPU Cores per node 76 128
CPU Threads per node 152 256
Cache L1 64K (per core) 4MiB (je 64*32KiB L1I,L1D)
Cache L2 1MB (per core) 32MiB (64*512KiB)
Cache L3 57MB (shared, per CPU) 256MiB (16*16MiB)
Main memory 512 GB 1 TB
Accelerators 4x NVIDIA A100-40 8x NVIDIA A100-40
Memory per accelerator 40 GB 40 GB
Local disks 960 GB NVMe SSD 6x NVMe SSDs
Interconnect InfiniBand HDR InfiniBand HDR

Interconnect

An important component of HoreKa and HAICORE is the InfiniBand 4X HDR 200 GBit/s interconnect. All nodes are attached to this high-throughput, very low-latency (~ 1 microsecond) network. InfiniBand is ideal for communication intensive applications and applications that e.g. perform a lot of collective MPI communications.

A look at some of the InfiniBand ports in the HoreKa interconnect (Simon Raffeiner, SCC/KIT)

Last update: September 27, 2023