The following are technical specifications for Ascend.  

Number of Nodes

24 nodes

Number of CPU Sockets

48 (2 sockets/node)

Number of CPU Cores

2,304 (96 cores/node)

Cores Per Node

96 cores/node (88 usable cores/node)

Internal Storage

12.8 TB NVMe internal storage

NVHPC, or NVIDIA HPC SDK, C, C++, and Fortran compilers support GPU acceleration of HPC modeling and simulation applications with standard C++ and Fortran, OpenACC® directives, and CUDA®. GPU-accelerated math libraries maximize performance on common HPC algorithms, and optimized communications libraries enable standards-based multi-GPU and scalable systems programming.

Users who would like to use the Ascend cluster will need to request access.  This is because of the particulars of the Ascend environment, which includes its size, GPUs, and scheduling policies.

Motivation

Access to Ascend is done on a case by case basis because:

The NVIDIA Collective Communication Library (NCCL) implements multi-GPU and multi-node communication primitives optimized for NVIDIA GPUs and Networking. NCCL provides routines such as all-gather, all-reduce, broadcast, reduce, reduce-scatter as well as point-to-point send and receive that are optimized to achieve high bandwidth and low latency over PCIe and NVLink high-speed interconnects within a node and over NVIDIA Mellanox Network across nodes.