4.4. UAntwerp Hopper hardware#
Note
Hopper was a UAntwerp Tier-2 cluster, which was decommissioned in 2023. This page is obsolete, and we keep it only for future reference. For the currently active UAntwerp Tier-2 clusters, see UAntwerp Tier-2 Infrastructure.
The Hopper compute nodes were used for:
Jobs that used old software that could not be properly compiled to benefit from the extensions in the instruction sets of Leibniz and Vaughan, or that lack enough parallelism to fully exploit the Leibniz or Vaughan compute nodes (even taking into account that multiple jobs launched nearly simultaneously can still make it possible to use the full capacity of a Leibniz or Vaughan compute node).
Jobs that needed more than 128 GB of memory to run properly and that did not need more than 20 cores per node.
Batches of single core jobs (that could not run on your own computer).
Jobs that did not fit in a maximum wall time of 3 days and could not be restarted cheaply.
4.4.1. Compute nodes#
When submitting a job with sbatch or using srun, you could choose to specify
the partition your job was submitted to.
When the option was omitted, your job was submitted to the default partition (ivybridge).
The maximum execution wall time for jobs was 7 days (168 hours).
Slurm partition |
nodes |
processors per node |
memory |
local disk |
network |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
ivybridge |
23 |
2x 10-core Intel Xeon E5-2680v2 @2.8 GHz |
256 GB |
500 GB |
FDR10-IB |
4.4.2. History#
Hopper was a compute cluster at UAntwerp in operation from late 2014 till the summer of 2020. The cluster had 168 compute nodes with dual 10-core Intel E5-2680v2 Ivy Bridge generation CPUs connected through an InfiniBand FDR10 network, 144 of these compute nodes having 64 GB RAM and 24 having 256 GB RAM.
When the cluster was moved out in the summer of 2020 to make space for the installation of Vaughan, the 24 nodes with 256 GB RAM were recovered for further use. These nodes were finally decommissioned in the summer of 2023. They were replaced by the Breniac cluster, re-using nodes previously belonging to the decommissioned KU Leuven Tier-1 Breniac cluster.
Origin of the name#
Hopper was named after Grace Hopper. Grace Hopper was an American mathematician turned computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. She worked as a programmer of some of the first computer systems and devised the theory of machine independent programming languages. Her work laid at the base of the programming language COBOL.