Hardware Details for Beagle3

System Technical Specifications

Beagle3 is the newest addition to RCC’s high end HPC systems. Beagle3 is primarily a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) cluster. This new HPC system will facilitate a select user group from the University of Chicago community to benefit from advanced computing infrastructure that enables novel discoveries and innovations.

Two login nodes are available for Beagle3. The key features of the Beagle3 hardware are listed as follows:

• 44 GPU compute nodes (a total of 176 GPUs)
• 22 nodes with 4x NVIDIA A100 GPUs
• 22 nodes with 4x NVIDIA A40 GPUs
• 4 Big Shared memory nodes with 512GB of memory per node and no GPUs (“beagle3-bigmemX”)
• All nodes have HDR InfiniBand (100 Gbps) network cards.
• 1 PB of usable high-capacity GPFS space

Choosing between A40 and A100

The A40 has more CUDA cores and higher single precision floating point (FP32) performance. The A100 has more Tensor cores and higher tensor plating point (TF32) performance, making it more suitable for machine learning tasks. The A40 has no double-precision (FP64) hardware acceleration, so only the A100 should be used for applications that need to utilize double precision.

The CPU specifications of the compute node on the Beagle3 platform are as follows:

Architecture:        x86_64
CPU(s):              32
Thread(s) per core:  1
Core(s) per socket:  16
Sockets:             2
Model name:          Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6346 CPU @ 3.10GHz
CPU MHz:             3600.000
L1d cache:           48K
L1i cache:           32K
L2 cache:            1280K
L3 cache:            36864K