Vaughan hardware

The Vaughan cluster was installed in the summer of 2020. It is a NEC system consisting of 152 compute nodes with dual 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.

Vaughan also contains 2 node types for GPU computing: 1 node with four NVIDIA (Tesla) Ampere A100 GPU compute cards and 2 nodes equipped with two AMD Instinct (Arcturus) MI100 GPU compute cards.

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. It 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 jobs should be use Leibniz or the older Hopper nodes.

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)

  • 1 NVIDIA GPU node

  • 2 AMD GPU nodes

  • 2 login nodes

    • 2 AMD Epyc 7282 CPUs@2.8 GHz (Rome), 16 cores each

    • 256 GB RAM

    • 2x 480 GB SSD local disk (raid 1)

All nodes are connected using an InfiniBand HDR100 network. The compute nodes are logically organised in 4 islands (i.e., nodes connected to a single switch) with respectively 32, 36 and twice 44 nodes each. Storage is provided through the central UAntwerp storage system.

Login infrastructure

Direct login is possible to both login nodes.

  • From outside the VSC network: use the external interface names. Note that from 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.

Login node

External interface

Internal interface

generic name

login-vaughan.hpc.uantwerpen.be

login.vaughan.antwerpen.vsc

per node

login1-vaughan.hpc.uantwerpen.be

login1.vaughan.antwerpen.vsc

login2-vaughan.hpc.uantwerpen.be

login2.vaughan.antwerpen.vsc

Available resources

Characteristics of the compute nodes

Vaughan is running the Slurm Workload Manager as its 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.

Make sure to read the following pages which give a lot of information on Slurm and how to convert your Torque scripts:

Since Vaughan is a homogeneous system with respect to CPU type, memory and interconnect, it is not needed to specify any features.

Available partitions

When submitting a job with sbatch or using srun, you can choose to specify the partition your job is submitted to. This indicates the type of your job and imposes some restrictions, but may let your job start sooner. When the option is omitted, your job is submitted to the default partition (zen2).

The following partitions are available:

Partition

Limits

zen2

Default. Maximum wall time of 3 days.

debug

Maximum 2 nodes with a maximum wall time of 1 hour.

short

Maximum wall time of 6 hours, with priority boost.

ampere_gpu

Submit to the NVIDIA Ampere GPU node.

arcturus_gpu

Submit to the AMD Arcturus GPU nodes.

See GPU computing @ UAntwerp for more information on using the GPU nodes.

Compiling for Vaughan

To compile code for Vaughan, all intel, foss and GCC modules can be used (the latter being 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 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 using 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) 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. In particular, -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 Vaughan (preferably version 9 or more recent) 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 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.

Further documentation

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.