ScienceCloud Hardware¶

ScienceCloud currently provides the compute instances and storage with the following grand totals:

Computing¶

nodes	virtual CPUs	total RAM
🔧 Coming Soon

GPU-Computing¶

nodes	GPUs	virtual CPUs	total RAM
🔧 Coming Soon

For more information about GPUs on ScienceCloud, see the GPU-enabled flavors section.

Storage¶

Block storage served by Cinder and object storage served by Swift:

type	raw capacity	usable capacity
Block storage	🔧 Coming Soon
Object storage	🔧 Coming Soon

Network¶

Every compute node has a non-blocking, redundant, 10gbps link to the internal network. This network is used to access the underlying storage infrastructure and provide network connectivity to the virtual machines.

The uplink to the University network is a redundant 20gbps link.

Flavor¶

Instances started on ScienceCloud land on different generations of CPUs depending on flavor.

A virtual machine flavor describes the size and kind of resources that will be allocated in a virtual machine. It is basically a combination of the number of CPUs and the amount of RAM composing your virtual machine, plus the flavor "type".

A flavor type is a group of flavors that have common features, but vary only in the size. For example the ratio between the number of virtual CPUs (henceforth: vCPU) and the RAM amount can vary between each flavor type, but is always the same for flavors of the same kind.

Common features are:

• the ratio between the number of virtual CPUs and the amount of RAM (in GB)
• the processor model
• the ratio between the number of vCPUs and physical CPUs (e.g., there could be 2 vCPUs that are shared on 1 physical core)
• the allocation of a certain number of GPU devices
• vCPU cost

Flavors are statically mapped to a specific hypervisor type (a hypervisor is a virtual machine monitoring system), so each different group of flavors will run only on a specific set of hypervisors, and the CPU type seen from within the virtual machine does not change.

"*-hpcv3" flavors¶

"*-hpcv4" flavors¶

"*-gpu*" flavors¶

To make use of a GPU device on your ScienceCloud instance, you need to select one of the "GPU-enabled" flavors in the launch wizard.

The naming of the flavors follows the usual scheme with the addition of the suffix "-gpu" followed by the model of the GPU device.

Available GPU flavors¶

Name	Hypervisor CPU	Accelerator
🔧 Coming Soon

Available GPU models¶

Hypervisors¶

No. nodes	CPU type @ base clock	Base clock	Architecture	CPU/vCPU	RAM per node	Accelerators
🔧 Coming Soon

Both the instance root disk's data and any additionally attached volumes' data are stored on our CEPH cluster and are thus accessed via a redundant 20 or 50 gigabit network link.

To reduce fragmentation flavors are statically mapped to a specific hypervisor type. More specifically:

Flavor type	Hypervisor CPU
🔧 Coming Soon

There are a few cases in which it is desirable to have instances backed by the same generation of hardware (i.e. custom compiled software optimized with specific flags).

This can be accomplished on request by enabling specific flavors that are bound to a specific CPU generation. You should keep in mind that the binding solution will be more prone to issues during hardware maintenance as the instances cannot be moved easily from one host to another.

Flavor availability report¶

The table below shows the current number of available public flavors by type.

Direct link: https://herd.science-it.uzh.ch/avail-flavors/avail-public-flavors.html