Argonne National Laboratory

Nexus Resources

Polaris 
Polaris is a production AMD+NVIDIA supercomputer at the ALCF with 560 nodes total. For purposes of experimental data analysis and Nexus projects, 56 nodes of Polaris are schedulable for on-demand workloads. This way experiments get near-immediate access to the computing they require during their experiments. More details about Polaris can be found in the related ALCF documentation. 

Edith 
The ALCF Edith system serves as a testbed for Nexus / Integrated Research Infrastructure (IRI) related work at the ALCF. The goal of Edith is to allow users to experiment with technology and policy in an environment similar to Polaris but which would not be supported on a production system. 

For consistency with Polaris, Edith leverages a similar AMD+NVIDIA architecture. Edith consists of four nodes in total, with each node including two AMD EPYC 7532 32-core processors, two NVIDIA A100 GPUs, and 512GB RAM. Edith is available in a similar way as other production systems: 

  • Jobs are scheduled using the PBS scheduler. As a test and development system, Edith will at times run a newer version of the scheduler than other ALCF systems. 

  • Production filesystems are mounted on Edith, simplifying transfer of data to Edith via Globus endpoints that target these filesystems.  

  • Containers are supported on Edith using apptainer infrastructure.  

  • Networking connectivity through ESnet, comparable to our other systems. 

Access to Edith is granted by request and leverages accounts already in use by ALCF users. Edith is reachable via the public internet in the same manner as other ALCF systems. 

For testbed purposes, we will consider reasonable requests to accommodate experiments which require alternative configurations and infrastructure not yet appropriate for production systems.