• Production system
  • In service
  • Regional system for N8 group universities, and EPSRC-funded projects
  • Funded by N8, EPSRC
  • Partitions
    • 32 nodes, with 4 Tesla V100 32G accelerators per node
      • Manufactured by IBM
      • Scheduler: Slurm
    • 4 nodes, with 4 Tesla T4 16G accelerators per node
      • Manufactured by IBM
      • Scheduler: Slurm
    • 7 nodes, with 1 H100 96GB accelerator per node
      • Manufactured by gh001-gh006 Vespertec, gh007 SuperMicro
      • Scheduler: Slurm
    • 1 nodes, with 2 H100 144GB accelerators per node
      • Manufactured by gh008 SuperMicro
      • Scheduler: Slurm
  • Interconnects: InfiniBand EDR, NVLink 2.0

Bede

Bede is a supercomputer hosted at Durham University on behalf of N8CIR. The main supercomputer comprises 32 gpu nodes and 4 infer running on PowerPC chips. Bede also includes a NVIDIA Grace-Hopper partition, with 7 nodes with a Grace Hopper Superchip with a H100 96GB gpu module, and one node with 2 Grace Hopper Superchips with a H100 144GB gpu module each.

Within each gpu node in the original system, the CPU and GPUs are linked to a single NVLink 2.0 bus. Nodes are connected with dual-rail Mellanox EDR Infiniband interconnects. infer nodes have GPUs on the PCIe bus. The Grace Hopper Superchips include a 900 GB/s NVLink-C2C within the chip and Mellanox CONNECTX-7 NDR200 Infiniband interconnects between nodes.

Partition specifications

Note that all Grace Hopper nodes are in the gh partition but have two different specifications within the partition. The monster node gh008 can be requested with the sbatch --nodelist argument.

Partition Accelerator RAM CPU Connectivity Access
gpu 4x Tesla V100 32GB 512GB DDR4 32 cores/4 threads per core @2.7GHz (2xIBM POWER9) 2x Mellanox EDR Infiniband Slurm via login nodes
infer 4x Tesla T4 16GB PCIe 256GB DDR4 40 cores/4 threads per core @2.9GHz (2xIBM POWER9) 1x Mellanox EDR Infiniband Slurm via login nodes
gh001-gh007 H100 96GB 480GB LPDDR5X 72 cores @3.483GHz (NVIDIA Grace ARM Neoverse V2) 1x Mellanox CONNECTX-7 NDR200 @100Gbps Slurm via gh-login nodes
gh008 2x H100 144GB 960GB LPDDR5X 144 cores @3.483GHz (2x NVIDIA Grace ARM Neoverse V2) 2x Mellanox CONNECTX-7 NDR200 @100Gbps Slurm via gh-login nodes

Documentation

Gaining access

To gain access to Bede for your project, a request form must be submitted. Project access can be requested by projects from N8 group universities, or through the EPSRC access to HPC programme. Additionally, the EPSRC High End Computing consortia are allocated a portion of compute time on Bede. Details on these application routes can be found at https://n8cir.org.uk/bede/accessing-bede/. Once an application has been successful, the administrators will issue a project code which can be used to get an account on Bede.

For researchers on a project registered on Bede to gain access, you will need to create an EPCC SAFE account at https://safe.epcc.ed.ac.uk/, and then request access with the project code which you should be able to get from your project PI. Further details on how to gain access to Bede, and how to make use of the system once you have gained access, are at https://bede-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage

Restrictions

The maximum time limit for jobs on production nodes is 2 days. There are no other limits on job size defined, other than the maximum size the hardware can accomodate. Jobs will be scheduled by Slurm with multifactor priority.

Binaries must be compiled for the architecture of the partition used; PowerPC for the main nodes, ARM for the Grace Hopper nodes.