What should my HPC cluster look like?

Building a #HPC cluster is quite the challenge, especially with the variety of hardware and software options there are today. With the ever-changing hardware landscape, especially at the high-performance end, it can be important to split your decision into several elements and also future-proof your hardware. We’ll look at hardware and software here.

Software

Our LMX Cloud software is a comprehensive Cloud HPC cluster management stack that supports a broad range of workloads and software environments, enabling organizations with an agile and scalable IT infrastructure.

• Complete HPC user environment
• Control infrastructure via cloud APIs
• Comprehensive monitoring and alerting
• OpenLDAP authentication
• Support for virtual machines and bare metal
• Containerised application stack support via Singularity
• Web UI Portal with support for file transfers, workload management and VNC, RStudio and Jupyter support
• On-demand Kubernetes provisioning and scaling

Hardware

Compute – 1U Supermicro Ultra  
For the compute element of the GPU cloud, we recommend using SuperMicros Ultra SuperServers. We have extensive experience building this out as the compute node. It has 32 DIMM Slots, which can fit up to 8TB DRAM. For the CPU element, it supports Dual Socket P+ (LGA-4189) 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors.

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure – 2U 4 Node Supermicro Twin Pro
For the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, this particular server supports: Dual Socket P+ (LGA-4189) 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, 16 DIMMs which can have up to 4TB RAM. With Intel® X710 Dual port 10GBase-T LAN onboard, the networking element is well equipped to handle many heavy workloads. 

Storage – 4U 90 Bay Storage Server 
For storage, there are typically a lot of deployment scenarios, this server supports up to 90 bays with the following disk configuration: 90 3.5″/2.5″ Hot-swap SAS3/SATA3 drives, 2x Fixed slim SATA SSD, 2x NVMe M.2 (form factor: 2280 and 22110).

GPU – 4U 8 x H100 GPU Server
This GPU system has NVIDIA® NVLink™ with NVSwitch™ for GPU to GPU interconnect. This server has 8-GPU compatibility to handle all the GPU workloads throughout the cloud. 

NVMe – 2U 24 x NVMe Server
For the NVMe element, this server model supports 24x 2.5″ hot-swap NVMe/SATA/SAS drive bays (22x 2.5″ NVMe hybrid) and we’ve found it to be optimally a strong server for these types of configurations.

Talk to us about building out a HPC cluster today. Enquire today by using the form below, and one of our expert team will be in touch.