The Great Lakes service is a next generation HPC platform for U-M researchers that will provide several performance advantages compared to Flux, primarily in the areas of storage and networking. Great Lakes is built around the latest Intel CPU architecture called Skylake, and will have standard, large memory, visualization, and GPU-accelerated nodes. For more information on the technical aspects of Great Lakes, please see the Great Lakes configuration page.
Key Features:
- Approximately 13,000 Intel Skylake Gold processors providing AVX512 capability providing over 1.5 TFlop of performance per node
- 2 PB scratch storage system providing approximately 80 GB/s performance (compared to 8 GB/s on Flux)
- New InfiniBand network with improved architecture and 100 Gb/s to each node
- Each compute node will have significantly faster I/O via SSD-accelerated storage
- Large Memory Nodes with 1.5 TB memory per node
- GPU Nodes with NVidia Volta V100 GPUs (2 GPUs per node)
- Visualization Nodes with Tesla P40 GPUs
Great Lakes will use Slurm as the resource manager and scheduler, which will replace Torque and Moab on Flux. This will be the most immediate difference between the two clusters and will require some work on your part to transition from Flux to Great Lakes. Great Lakes will also use a simplified accounting structure. Unlike Flux, where you need an account for each resource, on Great Lakes you can use the same account and simply request the resources you need, from GPUs to large memory.
