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

Questions?

If you have questions about Bridges-2, please email help@psc.edu.

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CMU Group Uses Bridges-2 to Create Video Game for AI to Learn From, Teach Human Engineers

High School Students Study Nanotechnology, AI Heart Disease Detection Using Bridges-2

Unique Program at North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics Introduces Students to High Performance Computing

Corrected Numbers Allow Accurate Simulation of Oxygen Kicking Carbon Monoxide out of Hemoglobin

AI-Derived Parameters and Simulations on PSC’s Flagship Bridges-2 Offer Therapeutic Target for Carbon Monoxide Poisoning

North American Bird Populations Declining Even in Prime Habitat

Cornell Study Used PSC’s Bridges-2 to Analyze Data Including Observations from Birdwatcher Volunteers

PSC Mentors 2025 Winter Classic Invitational Student Cluster Competition

Students Install and Benchmark Quantum Espresso Code on Bridges-2 for the Final Challenge of Cluster Competition

Team Identifies, Finds Age of Three Brown Dwarfs in Outskirts of Our Galaxy

Study of Substellar Objects Using Bridges-2 Sheds Light on Globular Cluster Age and Early Development of Universe

Node types

Regular Memory nodes

Regular Memory (RM) nodes provide extremely powerful, general-purpose computing, machine learning and data analytics, AI inferencing, and pre- and post-processing.

488 RM nodes have 256GB of RAM, and 16 have 512GB of RAM.

Details
All 504 RM nodes have:

  • NVMe SSD (3.84TB)
  • Mellanox ConnectX-6 HDR Infiniband 200Gb/s Adapter
  • Two AMD EPYC 7742 CPUS, each with:
    • 64 cores
    • 2.25-3.40GHz
    • 256MB L3
    • 8 memory channels

Extreme Memory nodes

Extreme Memory (EM) nodes provide 4TB of shared memory for genome sequence assembly, graph analytics, statistics, and other applications requiring a large amount of memory for which distributed-memory implementations are not available.

Details

Each of Bridges-2’s 4 EM nodes consists of:

  • 35.75MB LLC 6 memory channels
  • 4TB of RAM: DDR4-2933
  • NVMe SSD (7.68TB)
  • Mellanox ConnectX-6 HDR InfiniBand 200Gb/s Adapter
  • Four Intel Xeon Platinum 8260M “Cascade Lake” CPUs:
    • 24 cores
    • 2.40–3.90GHz

GPU nodes

GPU nodes provide exceptional performance and scalability for deep learning and accelerated computing. Bridges-2 launched with 24 GPU nodes, totaling 40,960 CUDA cores and 5,120 tensor cores. A set of nodes from the predecessor Bridges system were later migrated to Bridges-2, adding the DGX-2 and nine more V100 GPU nodes to Bridges-2’s GPU resources.  In January 2025, Bridges-2 was further enhanced with the addition of 10 HPE Cray H100-80 nodes.

Details

Ten (10) Cray H100-80 nodes with:

  • 128GB RAM, DDR-4800
  • 4 NVMe SSds (7.68TB total)
  • 8 HPE Cray H100-80GB GPUs
  • 2 Intel Xeon “Sapphire Rapids” 8470 CPUs
    • 52 cores, 2.0-3.8 GHz

The 24 original Bridges-2 GPU nodes:

  • 512GB of RAM: DDR4-2933
  • 7.68TB NVMe SSD
  • Two Mellanox ConnectX-6 HDR Infiniband 200Gb/s Adapter
  • Eight NVIDIA Tesla V100-32GB SXM2 GPUs
  • 1 Pf/s tensor
  • Two Intel Xeon Gold 6248 “Cascade Lake” CPUs:
    • 20 cores, 2.50–3.90GHz, 27.5MB LLC, 6 memory channels

The Bridges GPUs migrated to Bridges-2 include nine nodes with:

  •  192GB of RAM, DDR4-2666
  • 4 NVMe SSDs, 2TB each
  • 8 NVIDIA V10016GB GPUs
  • 2 Intel Xeon Gold 6148 CPUs:
    • 20 cores/CPU, 2.4 – 3.7 Ghz

The DGX-2 has:

  • 1.5TB RAM, DDR4-2666
  • 8 NVMe SSDs, 8.84TB each
  • 16 NVIDIA Volta V100-32GB GPUs
  • 2 Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 CPUs:
    • 24 cores/CPU, 2.7 – 3.7 GHz