The next UPPMAX system
UPPMAX has procured its next major system, replacing the national sensitive data capacity in Bianca and providing significant high-performance compute and storage capacity for local users.
Rackham and Bianca were inaugurated in April 2017. They have served us well, with some expansions and modifications. All good things come to an end, though.
The vice-chancellor of Uppsala University has therefore signed a procurement agreement with Atea Sverige AB for a new system. This will mainly be a resource for users at Uppsala University through 2029, but will also replace Bianca the current national service for sensitive data through 2026. Former Rackham users with other affiliations are referred to other NAISS resources, mainly Dardel at PDC.
In total, the (still unnamed) system will provide over 5,000 CPU cores from AMD of the Zen 4 microarchitecture. Each core will be significantly faster than what we have provided so far. Typical compute nodes in the new system will have 576GB of RAM, giving ample of space to huge datasets when a full node is use. The total available storage will be in the range of 20PB. We will also be expanding our GPU capabilities to some extent, with 4 Nvidia H100 units across two nodes, and 40 Nvidia L40s cards.
We are not scrapping all the old hardware! Some recent nodes will be integrated in the system, and some of the older CPU nodes will be kept as a "surge" resource, being kept powered off most of the time, but possible to turn on automatically whenever the queues grow long. We will also transfer the GPUs currently present in Bianca, Snowy, and our cloud resources into the new system.
Expected delivery of the hardware is in June 2024. Setting up and validating the new system will be a significant task, but we'll keep you posted on when it will be possible to run your first jobs!
We'll ensure a smooth transition for current users on Bianca and Uppsala University users on Rackham. All non-UU users on Rackham are urged to explore NAISS resources, such as Dardel, for their compute and storage needs. Data and compute resources will become inaccessible for those users on December 31, as previously announced. Data in UU-affiliated projects can be transferred to the new system automatically.