TECH

Delta supercomputer will receive 330 compute nodes plus eight service nodes and 7 pentabytes of storage

On the last day of official work for the Blue Waters system, the US National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) welcomed its successor, the Delta supercomputer(image on the side), which will become the most powerful GPU system in National's portfolio Science Foundation (NSF) of the country.

The new system will be hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The supercomputer, as promised by the project's authors, will receive a balanced configuration with modern GPUs and CPUs. It will be integrated into the national cybersecurity system, and its resources will be made available to scientists through XSEDE and the SGCI (Science Gateways Community Institute). Those interested will be able to get help porting the CPU code to the GPU, but launching “old” applications will be simplified.

The supercomputer is scheduled to enter service in 2022. Delta will receive 330 compute nodes plus eight additional service nodes. All nodes of the first type will receive AMD EPYC Milan 64-core processors with a clock rate of 2.55 GHz. At the moment, their configuration is as follows:

-124 CPU nodes: 2 × CPU, 256GB DDR4-3200, 800GB NVMe SSD;

-100 NVIDIA Type I GPUs: 4×NVIDIA A100 (40GB HBM2) with NVLink, 1×CPU, 256GB DDR4-3200, 1.6TB NVMe SSD;

-100 nodes of NVIDIA Type II GPU: 4×NVIDIA A40 (48GB GDDR6), 1×CPU, 256GB DDR4-3200, 1.6TB NVMe SSD;

-5 NVIDIA Type III GPU nodes: 8×NVIDIA A100 (40GB HBM2) with NVLink, 2×CPU, 2TB DDR4-3200, 1.6TB NVMe SSD;

-1 AMD GPU node: 8× Instinct MI100 (32GB HBM2), 2×CPU, 2TB DDR4-3200, 1.6TB NVMe SSD.

The system will receive 3-PB of All-Flash fast storage, which will be deployed in spring 2022, as well as 7-PB of Luster storage. The main interconnect will be HPE SlingShot (100 Gbps). 

Image: Twitter / NCSAatIllinois