New MSI Supercomputer
MSI has selected its new supercomputer, to be called Agate. The system is a Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) cluster. Delivery is expected to begin in August 2021, with the cluster available to Minnesota researchers in the fall.
Agate’s theoretical performance is approximately 7 quadrillion floating point operations per second (7 petaflops), of which 2 petaflops are provided by the cluster's general-purpose processors, and 5 petaflops by the GPU subsystem. The Agate cluster will contain a total of 416 nodes.
One unique feature of the new Agate cluster is provision of an additional 80 Nvidia A40 single-precision GPUs, to further support interactive applications with server-side GPU rendering, and interactive machine-learning workloads via command line and JupyterHub.
“The new system is designed to position our faculty at the leading-edge of high performance computing capabilities and to minimize obstacles to accelerating data intensive research,” said Jim Wilgenbusch, Director of Research Computing.
Between now and Agate’s delivery, MSI will also be upgrading the capacity and performance of its cluster storage systems. We plan to bring in well over 10 Petabytes of raw storage and are starting with updating the existing Panasas parallel storage system to next-generation Panasas Ultra hardware.
The new cluster’s name, Agate, was selected by MSI staff from a pool of names submitted by 133 people. Lake Superior agate is the Minnesota State Gemstone.
More detailed information about Agate can be found on the system webpage. This page will be updated during the delivery, installation, and testing process.
Research Computing partners:
- Minnesota Supercomputing Institute
