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.
Access to Ascend is done on a case by case basis because:
These are the public key fingerprints for Ascend:
ascend: ssh_host_rsa_key.pub = 2f:ad:ee:99:5a:f4:7f:0d:58:8f:d1:70:9d:e4:f4:16
ascend: ssh_host_ed25519_key.pub = 6b:0e:f1:fb:10:da:8c:0b:36:12:04:57:2b:2c:2b:4d
ascend: ssh_host_ecdsa_key.pub = f4:6f:b5:d2:fa:96:02:73:9a:40:5e:cf:ad:6d:19:e5
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.
C, C++ and Fortran are supported on the Ascend cluster. Intel, oneAPI, GNU, nvhpc, and aocc compiler suites are available. The Intel development tool chain is loaded by default. Compiler commands and recommended options for serial programs are listed in the table below. See also our compilation guide.
This page includes a summary of differences to keep in mind when migrating jobs from other clusters to Ascend.
| Ascend (PER NODE) | Pitzer (PER NODE) | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Regular compute node | n/a |
40 cores and 192GB of RAM 48 cores and 192GB of RAM | |
It is strongly suggested to consider the memory use to the available per-core memory when users request OSC resources for their jobs.
oneAPI is an open, cross-industry, standards-based, unified, multiarchitecture, multi-vendor programming model that delivers a common developer experience across accelerator architectures – for faster application performance, more productivity, and greater innovation. The oneAPI initiative encourages collaboration on the oneAPI specification and compatible oneAPI implementations across the ecosystem.
oneAPI is available on Owens, Pitzer and Ascend. The versions currently available at OSC are:
GSL is a library of mathematical methods for C and C++ languages.
Miniconda3 is a free minimal installer for conda. It is a small, bootstrap version of Anaconda that includes only conda, Python, the packages they depend on, and a small number of other useful packages, including pip, zlib and a few others.
Miniconda is available on the Ascend Cluster. The versions currently available at OSC are:
In October 2022, OSC retires the Data Direct Networks (DDN) GRIDScaler system deployed in 2016 and expands the IBM Elastic Storage System (ESS) for both Project and global Scratch services. This expands the total capacity of Project and Scratch storage at OSC to ~16 petabytes with better performance.
