Vulcan

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This article is a draft

This is not a complete article: This is a draft, a work in progress that is intended to be published into an article, which may or may not be ready for inclusion in the main wiki. It should not necessarily be considered factual or authoritative.




Availability: TBA
Login node: vulcan.alliancecan.ca
Globus endpoint: TBA
System Status Page: TBA

Vulcan is a cluster dedicated to the needs of the Canadian scientific Artificial Intelligence community. Vulcan is located at the University of Alberta and is managed by the University of Alberta and Amii. It is named after the town Vulcan, AB, located in southern Alberta.

This cluster is part of the Pan-Canadian AI Compute Environment (PAICE).

Vulcan hardware specifications[edit]

Performance Tier Nodes Model CPU Cores System Memory GPUs per node Total GPUs
Standard Compute 202 Dell R760xa 2 x Intel Xeon Gold 6448Y 64 512 GB 4 x NVIDIA L40s 48GB 808

Storage System[edit]

Vulcan's storage system uses a combination of NVMe flash and HDD storage running on the Dell PowerScale platform with a total usable capacity of approximately 5PB.

Home space
xxxTB total volume
  • Location of /home directories.
  • Each /home directory has a small fixed quota.
  • Not allocated via RAS or RAC. Larger requests go to the /project space.
  • Has daily backup
Scratch space
xPB total volume
Parallel high-performance filesystem
  • For active or temporary (scratch) storage.
  • Not allocated.
  • Large fixed quota per user.
  • Inactive data will be purged.
Project space
xPB total volume
External persistent storage
  • Large adjustable quota per project.
  • Has daily backup.

Network Interconnects[edit]

Standard Compute nodes are interconnected with 100Gbps Ethernet with RoCE enabled.

Scheduling[edit]

The Vulcan cluster uses the Slurm scheduler to run user workloads. The basic scheduling commands are similar to the other national systems.

Software[edit]

  • Module-based software stack.
  • Both the standard Alliance software stack as well as cluster-specific software.