Mindwell hardware#

The KU Leuven / UHasselt Tier-2 cluster Mindwell entered production around mid 2026. Mindwell contains thin nodes, large memory nodes and GPU nodes.

Hardware details#

  • 40 thin nodes

    • 2 Intel Xeon Platinum 6972P CPUs@2.4 GHz (Granite Rapids), 96 cores each

    • 768 GiB RAM

    • default memory per core is 4000 MiB

    • 960 GB NVMe local disk

    • partitions batch_graniterapids|batch_graniterapids_long

  • 10 big memory nodes

    • 2 Intel Xeon 6972P CPUs @2.4 GHz (Granite Rapids), 96 cores each

    • 1536 GiB RAM

    • default memory per core is 8000 MiB

    • 3840 GB NVMe local disk

    • partition bigmem

  • 3 GPU nodes with 24 B200 GPUs in total

    • 2 AMD EPYC 9655 CPUs @2.6 GHz (Turin), 96 cores each

    • 1536 GiB RAM

    • default memory per core is 8000 MiB

    • 8 NVIDIA B200 SXM6 (Blackwell), 192 GiB GDDR, connected with NVLink

    • 960 GB NVMe local disk

    • partition gpu_b200

  • 2 interactive nodes

    • 2 Intel Xeon 6972P CPUs @2.4 GHz, 96 cores each

    • 768 GiB RAM

    • default memory per core is 2000 MiB

    • maximum memory per core is 4000 MiB

    • 2 NVIDIA RTX 5000 (Ada), 32 GiB GDDR

    • 960 GB SSD local disk

    • partition interactive

Storage#

A new IBM Storage Scale (also known as GPFS) parallel filesystem with a capacity of 5.8 PB is connected over NDR to the Mindwell cluster. Both scratch and project storage (the latter being similar to the staging storage on the Lustre parallel filesystem) are available on this new filesystem. The Mindwell compute nodes are also connected to the existing Lustre filesystem (through an Infiniband HDR-100 network), so all your existing data is accessible from the new cluster. Please read more about the available scratch filesystems for detailed information and best practices.

Additional highlights#

  • Software modules are only provided for toolchains starting from 2024a (CPU partitions) or 2025a (GPU partitions).

  • All nodes are interconnected using an Infiniband NDR network.

  • Similar to the wICE Sapphire Rapids and the H100 nodes, the new cluster is direct liquid cooled.