shared High-Performance Computing (sHPC)

Last changed: 2024-04-17

This document describes the shared High-performance computing (sHPC) service offering in NREC.

What’s different

The sHPC service offering in NREC differs slightly from the normal services. The purpose is to offer flavors for compute or memory hungry workloads and isolate them from impacting workloads in the normal services.

  • sHPC workloads are still sharing resources in the same way as in the normal services, albeit with much less overcommit ratios. This ensures that the workloads in the sHPC service are guaranteed a high degree of available resources even though there are no dedicated resources. This leads to better resource utilization for the NREC infrastructure.

  • The sHPC service has three flavor sets weighted for compute and memory intensive workloads respectively. Read more about the available flavors belov.

  • Continuous uptime is not provided in sHPC service because the instances have their hard drive located locally on the hypervisors. Instances will be taken down in planned maintainance windows, scheduled for the second Tuesday of the month.

These are the key differences in the NREC infrastructure for sHPC instances compared to normal instances:

sHPC

Normal

AMD EPYC processors, 2nd gen or newer.

Various model and generation Intel processors.

Slight overcommitment of CPU and memory for best resorce utilization

Resources such as CPU and memory are overcommitted, as workloads usually don’t use more than a fraction of the given resources.

Maintainance windows forcing instances to be shut down while the NREC team performs upgrades on the hypervisors.

No scheduled downtime for instances.

Getting Access

Please use the normal form to apply for a project and apply for a shared project, then check the box “Need access to shared HPC” in order to gain access to the sHPC flavors. If you already have a shared project, please use the normal support channels as described on our support page in order to apply for access.

Flavors

The sHPC flavors are divided into three categories:

Flavor Type

Available in Region

Main Purpose

shpc.m1a

BGO, OSL

Balanced workloads

shpc.c1a

BGO, OSL

Compute intensive workloads

shpc.r1a

BGO, OSL

Memory intensive worklads

In addition, we have the following disk optimized flavor sets. These use local NVMe or SSD storage on the hypervisor:

Flavor Type

Disk Size

Main Purpose

shpc.m1ad1

200 GB

Balanced workloads

shpc.m1ad2

500 GB

Balanced workloads

shpc.m1ad3

1000 GB

Balanced workloads

shpc.m1ad4

2000 GB

Balanced workloads

shpc.c1ad1

200 GB

Compute intensive workloads

shpc.c1ad2

500 GB

Compute intensive workloads

shpc.c1ad3

1000 GB

Compute intensive workloads

shpc.c1ad4

2000 GB

Compute intensive workloads

The disk optimized flavors are identical to their «m1a» and «c1a» counterparts, except for the OS disk size. The disk optimized flavors are only available by request.

Detailed information about the sHPC flavors:

Flavor Name

Virtual CPUs

Memory

Access

shpc.m1a.2xlarge

8

32 GiB

by default

shpc.m1a.4xlarge

16

64 GiB

by default

shpc.m1a.8xlarge

32

128 GiB

by default

shpc.c1a.2xlarge

8

16 GiB

by default

shpc.c1a.4xlarge

16

32 GiB

by default

shpc.c1a.8xlarge

32

64 GiB

by default

shpc.c1a.16xlarge

64

128 GiB

by default

shpc.r1a.xlarge

4

32 GiB

by request only

shpc.r1a.2xlarge

8

64 GiB

by request only

shpc.r1a.4xlarge

16

128 GiB

by request only

shpc.r1a.8xlarge

32

256 GiB

by request only

shpc.r1a.12xlarge

48

384 GiB

by request only

The therm vCPU refers to physical threads, which is two pr physical CPU core. So, 64 vCPUs translates into 32 physical, multithreaded real CPU cores.