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Hardware Info

General Configuration

There are 18 GPU nodes. Each GPU node contains the following:

• two sockets of 20-core Intel Xeon Gold 6148 ('Skylake') @ 2.40 GHz
• 384 GB DDR4 memory
• 930 GB on-node NVMe storage
• 8 NVIDIA V100 ('Volta') GPUs, each with with 16 GB HBM2 memory
  • Connected with NVLink interconnect
• 4 dual-port Mellanox MT27800 (ConnectX-5) EDR InfiniBand network cards

Node Topology

Each Cori GPU node contains 8 GPUs connected to each other in a 'hybrid cube-mesh' topology. In this arrangement, each GPU contains a single NVLink connection to each of two GPUs, and a doubly-bonded NVLink connection to two more GPUs, with twice the bandwidth of a single NVLink connection. So, each GPU is connected directly to 4 others. All GPUs are connected to the Skylake CPUs and the Infiniband network interface cards (NICs) via PCIe 3.0; there are 4 switches per node connecting the GPUs, NIC, and CPUs at a peak bandwidth of 16 GB/s in each direction. A diagram of this topology is provided below.

In the above diagram, one arrow represents one NVLink connection with a peak bandwidth of 25 GB/s per direction. A parallel set of arrows represents two NVLink connections which combine for a peak bandwidth of 50 GB/s. So, for example, on any node, GPU 0 has point-to-point connections with GPUs 1 and 2 at a peak bandwidth of 25 GB/s. Additionally, as illustrated, GPU 0 has point-to-point connections with GPUs 3 and 4 at a peak bandwidth of 50 GB/s.

Image and information adapted from Nvidia.