National systems

Compute clusters

A general-purpose cluster is designed to support a wide variety of types of jobs, and is composed of a mixture of different nodes. We broadly classify the nodes as:

• base nodes, containing typically about 4GB of memory per core;
• large-memory nodes, containing typically more than 8GB memory per core;
• GPU nodes, which contain graphic processing units.

The large parallel cluster Niagara is designed to support multi-node parallel jobs requiring more than 1000 CPU cores, although jobs as small as a single node are also supported there. Niagara is composed of nodes of a uniform design, with an interconnect optimized for large jobs.

All clusters have large, high-performance storage attached. For details about storage, memory, CPU model and count, GPU model and count, and the number of nodes at each site, please click on the cluster name in the table below.

List of compute clusters

Name and link	Type	Sub-systems	Status
Béluga	General-purpose	beluga-compute beluga-gpu beluga-storage	In production
Cedar	General-purpose	cedar-compute cedar-gpu cedar-storage	In production
Graham	General-purpose	graham-compute graham-gpu graham-storage	In production
Narval	General-purpose	narval-compute narval-gpu narval-storage	In production
Niagara	Large parallel	niagara-compute niagara-storage hpss-storage	In production

Cloud - Infrastructure as a Service

Our cloud systems are offering an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) based on OpenStack.

Name and link	Sub-systems	Description	Status
Arbutus cloud	arbutus-compute-cloud arbutus-persistent-cloud arbutus-dcache	VCPU, VGPU, RAM Local ephemeral disk Volume and snapshot storage Shared filesystem storage (backed up) Object storage Floating IPs dCache storage	In production
Béluga cloud	beluga-compute-cloud beluga-persistent-cloud	VCPU, RAM Local ephemeral disk Volume and snapshot storage Floating IPs	In production
Cedar cloud	cedar-persistent-cloud cedar-compute-cloud	VCPU, RAM Local ephemeral disk Volume and snapshot storage Floating IPs	In production
Graham cloud	graham-persistent-cloud	VCPU, RAM Local ephemeral disk Volume and snapshot storage Floating IPs	In production