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HPE Superdome Flex

The HPE Superdome Flex is a large shared memory node. It is especially well suited for data intensive application scenarios, for example to process extremely large data sets completely in main memory or in very fast NVMe memory.

The hardware specification is documented on the page HPC Resources.

Local Temporary on NVMe Storage

There are 370 TB of NVMe devices installed. For immediate access for all projects, a volume of 87 TB of fast NVMe storage is available at /nvme/1/<projectname>. A quota of 100 GB per project on this NVMe storage is set.

With a more detailed proposal to hpcsupport@zih.tu-dresden.de on how this unique system (large shared memory + NVMe storage) can speed up their computations, a project's quota can be increased or dedicated volumes of up to the full capacity can be set up.

Hints for Usage

  • Granularity should be a socket (28 cores)
  • Can be used for OpenMP applications with large memory demands
  • To use OpenMPI it is necessary to export the following environment variables, so that OpenMPI uses shared-memory instead of Infiniband for message transport:
export OMPI_MCA_pml=ob1
export OMPI_MCA_mtl=^mxm
  • Use I_MPI_FABRICS=shm so that Intel MPI doesn't even consider using Infiniband devices itself, but only shared-memory instead