Research Computing
High Performance Computing Clusters
The University of South Carolina High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters are available
to researchers requiring specialized hardware resources for computational 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 of 356 individual nodes and provides a
total core count of 16,616 CPU cores. The cluster is a heterogeneous configuration,
consisting of 291 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.
Research Computing 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
356 compute, GPU and Big Data nodes, providing 16,616 CPU cores. Compute and GPU nodes
have 128-256 GB of RAM and Big Data nodes have 2TB 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 (Retired)
This cluster was available for teaching purposes only. There were about 55 compute
nodes with 2.8 GHz and 2.4 GHz CPUs each with 24 GB of RAM.
Historical 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 |
Status |
Hyperion Phase III |
356 |
28 (Compute) 28 (GPU) 48 (Big Data) |
16,616 |
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 |
Active |
Hyperion Phase II |
407 |
28 (Compute) 28 (GPU) 48 (Big Data) |
15,524 |
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 |
Retired |
Hyperion Phase I |
224 |
28 (Compute) 28 (GPU) 40 (Big Data) |
6,760 |
2.8 GHz (Compute, GPU) 2.1 GHz (Big Data) |
Compute (128 GB) GPU (128 GB) Big Data (1.5 TB) |
300 TB of Lustre storage 50 TB of NFS storage 1.5 PB Scratch (100 Gb/s Infiniband) |
8 |
8 |
EDR Infiniband 100 Gb/s |
Retired |
Bolden |
20 |
20 |
400 |
2.8 GHz |
64 GB |
300 TB |
1 |
1 |
FDR Infiniband 54 Gb/s |
Active |
Maxwell |
55 |
12 |
660 |
2.4 GHz/2.8 GHz |
24 GB |
20 TB |
15 (M1060) |
None |
QDR Infiniband 40 Gb/s |
Retired |