The Clusters

The GWDG operates various HPC systems, seperated into different clusters or “cluster islands”, most of which are documented here.

SCC

The SCC (Scientific Compute Cluster) provides HPC resources for

• Georg-August University, including UMG
• Max Planck Society
• and other related research institutions

NHR

NHR-NORD@Göttingen (NHR for short) is one NHR center in the NHR (Nationales Hochleistungsrechnen) Alliance of Tier 2 HPC centers providing HPC resources to all German universities (application required). The NHR cluster consists of a CPU island Emmy and a GPU island Grete. Emmy was previously part of HLRN (Norddeutscher Verbund für Hoch- und Höchstleistungsrechnen) IV, NHR’s predecessor, which provided HPC resources for universities in Northern Germany.

KISSKI

The KISSKI project provides a compute partition, which is listed under the GPU partitions.

REACT

The REACT program is an EU-funded initiative to support various economic and scoial developments, including one of our GPU partitions.

CARO

The CARO cluster is for exclusive use by DLR employees. CARO’s documentation is only available on the DLR intranet.

CIDBN

The CIDBN cluster “Sofja” is operated as an island within our HPC infrastructure, and shares the same setup and software stack as the SCC. It is located at a different site, with its own storage system and can be reached via dedicated login nodes, but otherwise can be considered another CPU partition.

Organization

The current organization of the SCC and NHR clusters is shown in the diagram below:

---
title: Current Cluster Organization
---
flowchart TB

%%    zib[\"NHR@ZIB Frontend Nodes<br>blogin[1-9]"/]
    internet([Internet])
    jumphosts{{"SCC Jumphosts<br>gwdu[19-20]"}}
    vpn[/GWDG VPN/]
    goenet[["GÖNET (Göttingen Campus)"]]

    subgraph SCC
    scc_frontends("SCC Frontends<br>gwdu[101-102]")
    scc_compute[Compute Nodes]
    scc_storage[(Storage)]
    end

    subgraph NHR
    nhr_frontends("NHR Frontends<br>glogin[1-13]")
    emmy_compute[Emmy Compute Nodes]
    grete_compute[Grete Compute Nodes]
    nhr_storage[(Storage)]
    end

    internet --> jumphosts
    internet --> vpn
    internet --> nhr_frontends
%%    zib --> nhr_frontends
    vpn --> goenet
    jumphosts --> scc_frontends
    goenet --> scc_frontends

    scc_frontends --> scc_compute
    scc_frontends --> scc_storage
    scc_compute --> scc_storage

    nhr_frontends --> emmy_compute
    nhr_frontends --> grete_compute
    nhr_frontends --> nhr_storage
    emmy_compute --> nhr_storage
    grete_compute --> nhr_storage

Essentially, both clusters consist of of their own separate set of the following nodes:

1. Frontend nodes, which users login to and are connected to the compute and cluster storage nodes
2. Compute nodes, which run user submitted compute jobs, connected to the cluster storage over the internal network.
3. Storage systems, which contain shared software, user data, etc.

The NHR’s frontend nodes can be connected to directly from the open internet.

The SCC’s frontend nodes, however cannot be connected to directly if you are not on GÖNET, the network of the Göttingen Campus including Eduroam in Göttingen. Instead, you can use one of the NHR frontend nodes as a jumphost, more details here.