More Ampere GPUs in Hydra#

We are happy to announce the immediate availability of 2 more GPU nodes in Hydra adding 4 new Nvidia A100 GPUs to the cluster. These new nodes are joining the ampere_gpu partition and share the same CPU, memory and GPU configuration with the other nodes in this partition.

  • 2x NVIDIA A100 GPU (40 GB of GPU memory)

  • 2x AMD Epyc 7282 CPUs (16 CPU cores)

  • 256 GB CPU memory

  • EDR (100Gbit) InfiniBand network

  • 25 Gbit Ethernet network

These 2 nodes have a new feature not found in the other nodes though. They have a very fast local scratch storage made of SSD drives with a total capacity of 5.9 TB.

This fast SSD storage will increase the performance of jobs that access big databases intensively with random patterns, such as AlphaFold. You can submit your jobs specifically to these two new nodes by using the sbatch option --constraint="big_local_ssd". The fast local scratch in these nodes is accessible as usual, through the environment variables $VSC_SCRATCH_NODE or $TMPDIR. In the future we will provide an option to automatically transfer large databases to the fast local scratch of these new nodes.

A wide range of software is already available on these nodes (module avail), but if you need anything else, please let us know at VUB-HPC Support.