Béluga

Availability : March, 2019

Login node : beluga.computecanada.ca

Globus Endpoint : computecanada#beluga-dtn

Data Transfer Node (rsync, scp, sftp,...) : beluga.computecanada.ca

Béluga is a general purpose cluster designed for a variety of workloads and situated at the École de technologie supérieure in Montreal. The cluster is named in honour of the St. Lawrence River's Beluga whale population.

Site-specific policies

By policy, Béluga's compute nodes cannot access the internet. If you need an exception to this rule, contact technical support with information about the IP address, port number(s) and protocol(s) needed as well as the duration and a contact person.

Crontab is not offered on Béluga.

Each job on Béluga should have a duration of at least one hour and a user cannot have more than 1000 jobs, running and queued, at any given moment.

Storage

HOME Lustre filesystem, 105 TB of space	Location of home directories, each of which has a small fixed quota. You should use the project space for larger storage needs. 50 GB of space and 500K files per user. There is a daily backup of the home directories.
SCRATCH Lustre filesystem, 2.6 PB of space	Large space for storing temporary files during computations. No backup system in place. 20 TB of space and 1M files per user. There is an automated purge of older files in this space.
PROJECT Lustre filesystem, 8.9 PB of space	This space is designed for sharing data among the members of a research group and for storing large amounts of data. 1 TB of space and 500K of files per group. There is a daily backup of the project space.

For transferring data via Globus, you should use the endpoint computecanada#beluga-dtn, while for tools like rsync and scp you can use a login node.

High-performance interconnect

A Mellanox Infiniband EDR (100 Gb/s) network connects together all the nodes of the cluster. A central switch of 324 ports links the cluster's island topology with a maximum blocking factor of 5:1. The storage servers are networked with a non-blocking connection. The architecture permits multiple parallel jobs with up to 640 cores (or more) thanks to a non-blocking network. For jobs requiring greater parallelism, the blocking factor is 5:1 but even for jobs executed across several islands, the interconnection is high-performance.

Node types and characteristics

Count	Type	Cores	Available Memory	Hardware details
172	small 96G	40	92G or 95000M	Two Intel Gold 6148 Skylake processors at 2.4 GHz; 480 GB SSD at 6 Gb/s
516	base 192G	40	185G or 190000M	same as small
12	large 768G	40	752G or 771000M	same as small
172	GPU	40	185G or 190000M	same as small, but four GPU NVIDIA V100 Volta (SXM2, 16 GB of HBM2 memory), 1.6 TB NVMe SSD

Globus is a file transfer service