Visualizing Science

What's in a Node?

Frontera is composed of 448,448 processing cores, spread across 8,008 nodes. The architecture of each node is key to Frontera’s performance, but they didn’t come this way out of the box. TACC worked alongside industry partners to design and deploy the nodes that power the fastest supercomputer for academic research in the world.

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Mellanox HDR-100 Infiniband Networking Card

Low-latency connections between nodes, and across the entire system, allow fast communications that are critical to solving machine learning and big data problems.

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CoolIT Systems Liquid Cooling Block

In-rack liquid cooling allows for a greater density of nodes, with more efficient heat dissipation. It’s quieter, too!

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Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 (x2)

Frontera’s peak node performance is powered by 56 cores per node.

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DDR4 SDRAM

Processors have gotten faster at a higher rate than memory, so each node is equipped with the fastest high bandwih2h random access memory.

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240GB Solid State Drive (not pictured)

Solid state drives on each node provide local access to compilers and libraries, so that large jobs running across multiple nodes don’t make duplicate requests of the shared filesystem.