Research Computing
HPC Clusters
The University of South Carolina campus High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters
are available to researchers requiring specialized hardware resources for research
applications. The clusters are managed by Research Computing (RC) in the Division
of Information Technology.
Research Computing resources at the University of South Carolina include the high-performance
computing cluster, Hyperion, which consists 407 individual nodes and provides a total
core count of 15,524 CPU cores. The cluster is a heterogeneous configuration, consisting
of 343 compute nodes, 8 large memory nodes, 53 GPU nodes, a large SMP system, and
2 IBM Power8 quad GPU servers. All nodes are connected via a high-speed, low latency,
Infiniband network at 100 Gb/s. All nodes are also connected to a 1.4 Petabyte high
performance GPFS scratch filesystem, and 450 Terabytes of home directory storage.
This cluster, managed by the Research Computing group under the Division of Information
Technology, is in the university data center that provides enterprise-level monitoring,
cooling, power backup and Internet2 connectivity.
RC clusters are available in job queues under the Bright Cluster Management system.
Bright provides a robust software environment to deploy, monitor and manage HPC clusters.
Hyperion
Hyperion is our flagship cluster intended for large, parallel jobs and consists of
407 compute, GPU and Big Data nodes, providing 15,524 CPU cores. Compute and GPU nodes
have 128 GB of RAM and Big Data nodes have 1.5 TB RAM. All nodes have EDR infiniband
(100 Gb/s) interconnects, and access to 1.4 PB of GPFS storage.
Bolden
This cluster is intended for teaching purposes only and consists of 20 compute nodes
providing 460 CPU cores. All nodes have FDR infiniband (54 Mb/s) interconnects and
access to the 300 TB of Lustre storage.
Maxwell
This cluster is available for teaching purposes only. There are about 55 compute nodes
with 2.8 GHz and 2.4 GHz CPUs each with 24 GB of RAM.
Summary of HPC Clusters
Name |
Number of nodes |
Cores per node |
TotalCores |
Processor speeds |
Memory per node |
Disk Storage |
GPU Nodes |
Big Data Nodes |
Interconnect |
Hyperion |
407 |
GEN1: 28 (Compute) GEN1: 28 (GPU) GEN1: 40 (Big Data) Gen2: 48 |
15,524 |
GEN1: 2.8 GHz (Compute, GPU) GEN1: 2.1 GHz (Big Data) GEN2: 3.0 GHz |
Compute (128 GB) GPU (128 GB) Big Data (1.5 TB) |
450 TB Home (10 Gb/s Ethernet) 1.4 PB Scratch (100 Gb/s Infiniband) |
9 (Dual P-100) 44 (Dual V100) |
8 |
EDR Infiniband 100 Gb/s |
Bolden |
20 |
20 |
400 |
2.8 GHz |
64 GB |
300 TB |
1 |
1 |
FDR Infiniband 54 Gb/s |
Maxwell |
55 |
12 |
660 |
2.4 GHz/2.8 GHz |
24 GB |
20 TB |
15 (M1060) |
None |
QDR Infiniband 40 Gb/s |