Bridges-2

Bridges-2, PSC’s flagship supercomputer, began production operations in March 2021. It is funded by a $10-million grant from the National Science Foundation.

Bridges-2 provides transformative capability for rapidly evolving computation- and data-intensive research, and creates opportunities for collaboration and convergence research. It supports both traditional and non-traditional research communities and applications. Bridges-2 integrates new technologies for converged, scalable HPC, machine learning and data; prioritizes researcher productivity and ease of use; and provides an extensible architecture for interoperation with complementary data-intensive projects, campus resources, and clouds.

Bridges-2 is available at no cost for research and education, and at cost-recovery rates for other purposes.

Core concepts and innovation

Bridges-2 was designed around the core concepts of converged HPC + AI + Data; a custom topology optimized for data-centric HPC, AI, and HPDA; heterogeneous node types for different aspects of workflows, including both CPUs and AI-targeted GPUS; 3 tiers of per-node RAM: 256GB, 512GB, and 4TB; an extremely flexible software environment; and community data collections and Big Data as a Service.

Innovative features built into Bridges-2 to facilitate these core concepts include:

• AMD EPYC 7742 CPUs: 64-core2.25–3.4 GHz
• AI scaling to 192 V100-32GB SXM2 GPUs
• 100TB, 9M IOPs flash array accelerates deep learning training, genomics, and other applications
• Mellanox HDR-200 InfiniBand doubles bandwidth & supports in-network MPI-Direct, RDMA, GPUDirect, SR-IOV, and data encryption
• Cray ClusterStor E1000 Storage System
• HPE DMF single namespace for data security and expandable archiving

Node types