Vaughan hardware

Vaughan is currently in pilot use. Initial use is on invitation only until all software is installed and courses for the new job system have been prepared. We expect from pilot users that they also go through the documentation on this site.

Vaughan was installed in the summer of 2020. It is a NEC system consisting of 104 nodes with two 32-core AMD Epyc 7452 Rome generation CPUs connected through a HDR100 InfiniBand network. All nodes have 256 GB RAM. The nodes do not have a sizeable local disk.

Access restrictions

Access is available for faculty, students (master’s projects under faculty supervision), and researchers of the AUHA. The cluster is integrated in the VSC network and runs to a large extent the standard VSC software setup. With Vaughan we do switch away from the Torque/Moab combo to Slurm Workload Manager and we use native Slurm job scripts. Users are required to take the “transition to Vaughan and Slurm” course when the setup of Vaughan is ready. Vaughan is also available to all VSC-users, though we appreciate that you contact the UAntwerp support team so that we know why you want to use the cluster.

Jobs can have a maximal execution wall time of 3 days (72 hours). Vaughan should only be used if you have large enough parallel jobs to or can otherwise sufficiently fill up all cores of a compute node. Other work should be done on Leibniz.

The login nodes are freely available. Access to the job queues and compute nodes is currently restricted. Contact UAntwerp user support (hpc@uantwerpen.be) if you are interested in being a test user. One requirement is that you have jobs large enough to fill a compute node.

Hardware details

  • 152 compute nodes

    • 2 AMD Epyc 7452 CPUs@2.35 GHz (Rome), 32 cores each
    • 256 GB RAM
    • 240 GB SSD local disk (for OS, should not be used as main scratch)

  • 2 login nodes

    • 2 AMD Epyc 7282 CPUs@2.8 GHz (Rome), 16 cores each
    • 256 GB RAM
    • 2x 480 GB SSD local disk

The nodes are connected using an InfiniBand HDR100 network. They are logically organised in 3 islands. 2 islands have 36 nodes and one has 32 nodes. Storage is provided through the central UAntwerp storage system. More info on the storage system is available on the UAntwerpen storage page.

Login infrastructure

Direct login is possible to both login nodes.

  • From outside the VSC network: use the external interface names. Outside of Belgium, a VPN connection to the UAntwerp network is required.
  • From inside the VSC network (e.g., another VSC cluster): use the internal interface names.
External interface Internal interface
Login generic login-vaughan.hpc.uantwerpen.be
Login login1-vaughan.hpc.uantwerpen.be
login1.vaughan.antwerpen.vsc
ln1.vaughan.antwerpen.vsc
login2-vaughan.hpc.uantwerpen.be
login2.vaughan.antwerpen.vsc
ln2.vaughan.antwerpen.vsc

Characteristics of the compute nodes

Since Vaughan is currently a homogeneous system with respect to CPU type, memory and interconnect, it is not needed to specify the corresponding properties (see also the page on specifying resources, output files and notifications).

Vaughan is running Slurm Workload Manager as the resource manager and scheduler. We do not support the PBS compatibility layer but encourage users to develop proper Slurm job scripts as one can then fully exploit the Slurm features and enjoy the power of the srun command when starting processes.

property explanation
r1, r2, r3 Nodes in the first, second or third island of compute nodes.
Use --constraint=[r1|r2|r3] to make sure that all nodes are allocated in a single island.

Compiling for Vaughan

To compile code for Vaughan, all intel, foss and GCC modules can be used (the latter equivalent to foss but without MPI and the math libraries).

Optimization options for the Intel compilers

As the processors in Vaughan are made by AMD, there is no explicit support in the Intel compilers. However, by choosing the appropriate compiler options, the Intel compilers still produce very good code for Vaughan that will often beat code produced by GCC (certainly for Fortran codes as gfortran is a rather weak compiler). To optimize specifically for Vaughan, compile on one of the Vaughan login or compute nodes and combine the option -march=core-avx2 with either optimization level -O2 or -O3. For some codes, the additional optimizations at level -O3 actually produce slower code (often the case if the code contains many short loops).

Note that if you forget these options, the default for the Intel compilers is to generate code at optimization level -O2 (which is pretty good) but for the Pentium 4 (-march=pentium4) which uses none of the new instructions and hence also none of the vector instructions introduced since 2005, which is pretty bad. Hence always specify -march=core-avx2 (or any of the equivalent architecture options specifically for Broadwell for specialists) when compiling code.

The -x and -ax-based options don’t function properly on AMD processors. These options add CPU detection to the code, and whenever detecting AMD processors, binaries refuse to work or switch to code for the ancient Pentium 4 architecture. E.g., -xCORE-AVX2 is known to produce non-working code.

Optimization options for the GNU compilers

We suggest to use the newest GNU compilers available on the Vaughan (preferably version 9 or younger) as the support for AMD processors has improved a lot recently. Never use the default GNU compilers installed on the system, but always load one of the foss or GCC modules.

To optimize for Vaughan, compile on one of the Vaughan login or compute nodes and combine either the option -march=native or -march=znver2 with either optimization level -O2 or -O3. In most cases, and especially for floating point intensive code, -O3 will be the preferred optimization level with the GNU compilers as it only activates vectorization at this level whereas the Intel compilers already offer vectorization at level -O2.

If you really need to use GCC version prior to version 8, -march=znver2 is not yet available. On GCC 6 or 7, -march=znver1 is probably the best choice. However, avoid using GCC versions that are even older.

Note that if you forget these options, the default for the GNU compilers is to generate unoptimized (level -O0) code for a very generic CPU (-march=x86-64) which doesn’t exploit the performance potential of the Vaughan CPUs at all. Hence one should always specify an appropriate architecture (the -march flag) and appropriate optimization level (the -O flag) as explained in the previous paragraph.

Origin of the name

Vaughan is named after Dorothy Vaughan, an Afro-American mathematician who worked for NACA and NASA. During her 28-year career, Vaughan prepared for the introduction of machine computers in the early 1960s by teaching herself and her staff the programming language of Fortran. She later headed the programming section of the Analysis and Computation Division (ACD) at Langley.