The Casper cluster is a system of specialized data analysis and visualization resources; large-memory, multi-GPU nodes; and high-throughput computing nodes.
Casper is composed of 100 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.
- 9 of these nodes also feature an NVIDIA Quadro GP100 GPU.
- 3 nodes feature a single NVIDIA Ampere A100 GPU.
- 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 of these nodes feature 4 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs
- 6 of these nodes feature 8 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs
- 64 high-throughput computing (HTC) nodes for small computing tasks using 1 or 2 CPUs.
- 62 HTC nodes have 384 GB of available memory
- 2 HTC nodes have 1.5 TB of available memory
- 4 nodes are reserved for Research Data Archive workflows.
See the hardware summary table below for detailed specifications.
Operating system: CentOS 7.8
Logging in on an NCAR system
To log in, start your terminal or Secure Shell client and run an ssh command as shown here: Some users (particularly on Macs) need to use -Y instead of -X when calling SSH to enable X11 forwarding. You can use this shorter command if your username for the system is the same as your username on your local computer: After running the ssh command, you will be asked to authenticate to finish logging in.ssh -X username@system_name.ucar.edu
OR
ssh -X username@system_name.hpc.ucar.edu
ssh -X system_name.ucar.edu
OR
ssh -X system_system_name.hpc.ucar.edu
Hardware
Data Analysis | 22 Supermicro 7049GP-TRT SuperWorkstation nodes |
Machine Learning/Deep Learning | 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 |
High-Throughput Computing nodes | 62 small-memory workstation nodes 384 GB DDR4-2666 memory per node 2 18-core 2.6-GHz Intel Xeon Gold 6240 (Cascade Lake) processors per node 1.6 TB local NVMe Solid State Disk 1 Mellanox ConnectX-5 100Gb Ethernet VPI adapter (GLADE, Campaign Storage, external connectivity) 1 Mellanox ConnectX-6 HDR200 InfiniBand VPI adapter. HDR100 link on each CPU socket 2 large-memory workstation nodes 1.5 TB DDR4-2666 memory per node 2 18-core 2.3-GHz Intel Xeon Gold 6240 (Cascade Lake) processors per node 1.6 TB local NVMe Solid State Disk 1 Mellanox ConnectX-5 100Gb Ethernet VPI adapter (GLADE, Campaign Storage, external connectivity) 1 Mellanox ConnectX-6 HDR200 InfiniBand VPI adapter, HDR100 link on each CPU socket |
Research Data Archive | 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) |