HPC Hardware Lab @Durham
The HPC Hardware Laboratory @Durham is used for prototyping and development of new systems and technologies. Many of the systems tested are readily available for benchmarking.
DINE and DINE2
DINE and DINE2 are experimental test clusters for exploring new hardware and networking technologies.
The BlueField DPU cluster, DINE, is equipped with 24 nodes each containing a NVIDIA BlueField-2 Data Processing Unit, with HDR200 InfiniBand connectivity. To use this facility submit jobs to the bluefield1 Slurm partition. It was previously equipped with BlueField1 and Rockport network cards.
The DINE2 cluster is an 8 node cluster equipped with a CerIO composability fabric, allowing GPUs to be added to servers upon demand.
GPU compute
We maintain multiple generations of GPU architecture from multiple vendors.
AMD GPU nodes
There are two nodes each with two AMD MI200 GPUs available. Submit jobs to the cosma8-shm2 partition. This partition also contains a node with one AMD MI100 GPU. To specify a particular GPU to submit to, use –exclude or –include.
NVIDIA GPU nodes
V100, A100 and H100 nodes are available for use.
Intel GPU nodes
A Ponte Vecchio GPU node is available
Composable infrastructure
COSMA contains a composable GPU and RAM system, attached to login8b and the cosma8-shm queue. If you need to use these resources in a different configuration, please ask cosma-support.
It also contains an 8-node system with 8 A30 GPUs, allowing up to 8 GPUs per node, based on a CerIO composable fabric.
Rockport network fabric
The Rockport network fabric is 6D torus network with 100G connectivity, installed as half of COSMA7. To use this, please submit to the cosma7-rp Slurm partition.
DWAVE quantum
The ExCALIBUR project funds quantum annealing system access via a DWAVE system, which is administered by COSMA staff. Please contact cosma-support if you need access.
CPU compute lab
A wide variety of processor technologies are available for testing and benchmarking and we try to maintain cutting-edge components.
Storage
Our storage laboratory includes prototype and production file systems of various types and technologies.
Solar
Our solar installation provides power directly usable by COSMA, allowing us to study the interplay between solar energy generation and HPC power usage.
Immersion cooling
We have funds to install a prototype immersion cooling tank, and provide access to this facility to HPC technical support teams from across the UK, to help reduce the entry barrier to this technology.
Heat storage
We are investigating the inter-seasonal storage of waste data centre heat using abandoned flooded coal mines beneath the data centre site, to allow this heat to be used for building heating during the colder winter months.