OSC's new Cardinal cluster is a heterogeneous system featuring Dell PowerEdge servers and the Intel® Xeon® CPU Max Series with high bandwidth memory (HBM) as the foundation to efficiently manage memory-bound HPC and AI workloads. Below is a summary of the hardware information:
- 326 "dense compute" nodes (96 usable cores, 128 GB HBM2e and 512 GB DDR5 memory)
- 32 GPU nodes (96 usable cores, 1 TB DDR5 memory, 4 NVIDIA H100 GPUs each with 94 GB HBM2e memory and NVIDIA NVLink)
- 16 large memory nodes (96 usable cores, 128 GB HBM2e and 2 TB DDR5 memory)
See the Cardinal page for more information.
Several open-source and licensed software packages have been installed on Cardinal. See "Available software packages" below for detailed information.
In preparation for the new hardware deployment, OSC would like to invite members of the client community to be a part of the "Cardinal Early User Program" (hereafter referred to as "the Program") through an application process. Clients selected to participate will gain access to Cardinal hardware in advance of the final public deployment, with the ability to run jobs at no charge. In exchange, OSC requests that these users collaborate closely with our staff to identify any issues within the environment.
Who is eligible to apply for the Early User Program?
All Principal Investigators (PIs) who have active projects at OSC.
Early user period
October 7 - November 3, 2024 (tentative)
Application period
September 16 - 30, 2024. Applicants will receive notification of their acceptance by October 4, 2024.
How to apply
Complete the form below.
Good candidates are:
- Able to test new functionality of Cardinal, including GPU ML/DL and HBM features.
- Able to test at least one of the packages: Abaqus, ANSYS, COMSOL, Schrodinger, StarCCM, Stata, LS-DYNA.
- Tolerant of failed jobs, disruptions to work, and zero notice outages, as we may have to frequently kill jobs or disrupt scheduling.
- Willing to provide feedback to OSC staff.
- Representative of the diversity of our clients. We would like to include different types of workloads and include universities from across the state, but the scope of our selection will largely depend on the limitations of staff time for software installation and support requirements.
Available software packages
Several open-source packages have been installed on the system. Additionally, the following licensed packages have been installed and will be transitioned from Owens to Cardinal: Abaqus, ANSYS, COMSOL, Schrodinger, StarCCM, Stata and LS-DYNA. Some of these packages will be phased in gradually. Schrodinger, COMSOL and Stata will be fully moved to Cardinal as soon as it is in production.
To view the currently available software packages installed on the Cardinal cluster, visit the software page and select "Cardinal" under the "System." We are actively working on the installations, but please note that some packages might not be available during the Program.
Job charging policy
Jobs run on Cardinal during the Program will not incur any charges nor count against any credits or budgets established for a project in my.osc.edu, due to the computing cost. All queued jobs submitted to Cardinal during the Program will be deleted at the end of the Program.
All jobs run on Cardinal after the Program will incur charges per our pricing policies.
How to get help
Please feel free to contact OSC Help if you have any questions.
