Quickstart/What Is Viper

What is Viper?

Viper is the University of Hull's supercomputer and is located on-site with its own dedicated team to administrate it and develop applications upon it.

What is a supercomputer?

A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of computing performance compared to a general-purpose computer. It achieves this level of performance by allowing the user to split a large job into smaller computation tasks which then run in parallel, or by running a single task with many different scenarios on the data across parallel processing units.

Why do we need a supercomputer?

The point of having a high-performance computer is so that the individual nodes can work together to solve a problem larger than any one computer can easily solve. And, just like people, the nodes need to be able to talk to one another in order to work meaningfully together. Of course, computers talk to each other over networks, and there is a variety of computer network (or interconnect) options available for business clusters (see here for an overview of cluster interconnects).

Supercomputers generally aim for the maximum in capability computing rather than capacity computing. Capability computing is typically thought of as using the maximum computing power to solve a single large problem in the shortest amount of time. Often a capability system is able to solve a problem of a size or complexity that no other computer can, e.g., a very complex weather simulation application.

How does a supercomputer work?

A high-performance computer like Viper has a lot of elements of a desktop computer — processors, memory, disk, operating system — just more of them. High-performance computers split off some of the tasks into separate elements to gain performance. An example of this on Viper is how it handles disk storage, which is a separate server with all of the storage directly connected to it. This is then connected across a high-speed network to all other individual computers (referred to as nodes).

Like just about all other supercomputers Viper runs on Linux, which is similar to UNIX in many ways and has a wide body of software to support it.

How powerful is Viper?

Viper's real compute power is achieved by having a large amount of standard compute nodes (Compute), in our case 180 of them. Each of those nodes has 28 processing cores, so a total of 5040 processing cores ( i.e. 180 x 28 cores ). Some specialised nodes are included which are more suited to dedicated applications, such as high memory (Highmem) nodes and GPU accelerator (GPU) nodes which are particularly suited to large memory modelling and machine learning respectively.

What is Viper used for?

The uses of supercomputers are widespread and continue to be used in new and novel ways every day.

Viper is used for

• Astrophysics
• BioEngineering
• Business School
• Chemistry
• Computer Science
• Computation Linguistics
• Geography
• And many more

Physical Hardware

Viper is based on the Linux operating system and is composed of approximately 5,500 processing cores with the following specialised areas:

• 180 compute nodes, each with 2x 14-core Intel Broadwell E5-2680v4 processors (2.4 –3.3 GHz), 128 GB DDR4 RAM
• 4 High memory nodes, each with 4x 10-core Intel Haswell E5-4620v3 processors (2.0 GHz), 1TB DDR4 RAM
• 4 GPU nodes, each identical to compute nodes with the addition of a Nvidia Ampere A40 GPU per node
• 2 Visualisations nodes with 2x Nvidia GTX 980TI
• Intel Omni-Path interconnect (100 Gb/s node-switch and switch-switch)
• 500 TB parallel file system (BeeGFS)