JURECA Evaluation Platforms

JURECA-DC was recently extended with three additional modules for evaluation and testing in preparation for upcoming procurements.

One of the modules consists of two nodes with four AMD Instinct MI250 GPUs each. This is the same GPU generation which broke the Exascale barrier with Frontier, featuring up to 90 teraflops performance in FP64 (double-precision floating-point) while only requiring a TDP (thermal design power) of 560 Watts. The nodes have two AMD EPYC 7443 Milan CPUs and 512 GB main memory. Each GPU has 128 GB device memory and is built as a multi-chip module (MCM) with two GPU chips contained in each MI250 device package. The ROCm software stack is available on these nodes. This hardware and software combination provides the ability to evaluate the current AMD GPU platform, the successor of which might be of interest for future, bigger systems at JSC.

Two NVIDIA Arm HPC Developer Kit nodes build another module. Each node has one Ampere Altra Q80-30 CPU, an 80-core ARM CPU with a low TDP of 210 W. 512 GB of main memory are available. Two NVIDIA A100 PCIe 40 GB GPUs are installed in each node. This PCIe version of the A100 has a lower TDP of 250 W compared to the 400 W of the versions in JURECA-DC and JUWELS Booster. A full ARM software stack is currently being developed, and first software modules are available via EasyBuild. We invite everyone interested in the ARM CPU architecture to test these nodes, given the possible future HPC CPUs NVIDIA Grace and SiPearl Rhea.

Another prominent extension is a Graphcore IPU-POD4 consisting of one access server and four GC200 IPUs containing 5888 IPU cores. The system is a hardware especially developed for AI workloads. It can provide 0.999 petaflops AI (FP16.16, half-precision) or 0.2497 petaflops FP32 (single-precision) performance. Applications can make use of the IPUs through the Graphcore Poplar SDK or one of several ML frameworks that have been extended with Graphcore plugins, such as TensorFlow or PyTorch.

All systems have been added to the official JURECA documentation with additional information on how to access and use them. If you are interested, please send an informal application.

Contact: Dr. Andreas Herten, Benedikt von St. Vieth

from JSC News No. 291, October 2022