Alpine Quick Start

Alpine is the University of Colorado Boulder Research Computing’s third-generation High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster. Alpine is a heterogeneous compute cluster currently composed of hardware provided from University of Colorado Boulder, Colorado State University, and Anschutz Medical Campus. Alpine currently offers 489 compute nodes and a total of 32,368 cores. Alpine can be securely accessed anywhere, anytime using Open OnDemand or ssh connectivity to the CURC system.

Alpine Quick-Start

1. From a login node, load the slurm/alpine module to access the SLURM job scheduler instance for Alpine:

   $ module load slurm/alpine
   

2. Once the Alpine Slurm job scheduler has been loaded you can submit and start jobs on the Alpine cluster. Consult the requesting resources section and the examples section to learn how to direct your jobs to the appropriate Alpine compute nodes.

3. Software can be loaded into the Alpine compute environment via the LMOD module system, which allows users choose software from our pre-installed software stack.

4. If you would like to use software that is not within our preinstalled stack, your application must be compiled using acompile. More information about the acompile command can be found under our partitions section.

Hint

• For a list of CURC provided software, see our CURC-Provided Software page.

  • Users can also submit a software installation request by following the instructions provided under the FAQ How can I submit a software installation request? dropdown.

• Consult our compiling and linking documentation for more information on compiling software.

Cluster Summary

Nodes

The Alpine cluster is made up of different types of nodes. A general overview of these nodes is as follows:

• CPU nodes: 423 AMD CPU compute nodes

• GPU nodes: a mixture of 41 NVIDIA and AMD GPUs

• High-memory nodes: 24 high-memory nodes with 1 TB of memory or more

Alpine is made possible due to its contributors. Below we provide each contributor, along with the number of nodes they have provided:

• University of Colorado Boulder: 375 nodes

• Colorado State University: 77 nodes

• CU Anschutz Medical Campus: 37 nodes

Note

• For specific details on node types and a breakdown of contributions made to Alpine, please see the Hardware Summary section of our Alpine Hardware page.

• All nodes are available to all users via the Slurm Fair Tree Fairshare Algoritm. For additional details on how to check your priority and shares, see the FAQ entitled How can I see my current FairShare priority?

Interconnect

The Alpine cluster has different types of interconnects/fabrics which connect different types of hardware, outlined below:

• CPU nodes: HDR-100 InfiniBand (200Gb inter-node fabric); available on most CPU nodes as of July 2023 and on most remaining CPU nodes pending hardware arrivals

• GPU nodes: 2x25 Gb Ethernet +RoCE

• High-memory nodes: A mixture of 2x25 Gb Ethernet +RoCE and 100 Gb Ethernet

• Scratch storage: 25Gb Ethernet +RoCE

Node Features

The Alpine cluster features some heterogeneity. A variety of feature tags are applied to nodes deployed in Alpine to allow jobs to target specific CPU, GPU, network, and storage requirements.

Use the sinfo command to determine the features that are available on any node in the cluster.

sinfo --format="%N | %f"

Note

Feature descriptions and finalized partition names are still being added to Alpine nodes. Refer to the description of features list below for current node features.

Description of features

• cpu: AMD EPYC CPU (cores per node vary between 32-128)

• a100: NVIDIA A100 GPU

• mi100: AMD MI100 GPU

• l40: NVIDIA L40 GPU

• h200: NVIDIA H200 GPU

• rtxpro6000: NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 GPU

• storage: large, fast RAID disk storage in node

• rh8: RedHat Enterprise Linux version 8 operating system

• ib: Features Infiniband, a high-speed message passing fabric for MPI jobs

Job Scheduling

All jobs on Alpine are run through a queue system using the SLURM job scheduler. Though many HPC workflows are run through batch-type jobs, interactive jobs on compute nodes are allowed; however, these jobs must also be initiated through the scheduler. High-priority jobs move to the top of the queue and are thus guaranteed to start running within a few minutes, unless other high-priority jobs are already queued or running ahead of them. High-priority jobs can run for a maximum wall time of 24 hours. Low-priority jobs have a maximum wall time of 7 days.

More details about how to use SLURM to run jobs can be found in our running applications with jobs documentation.

Allocations

When you receive a Research Computing account you are automatically assigned a Trailhead Auto-Allocation, which grants you a fixed share of ucb-general. The Trailhead is a great allocation for smaller jobs or testing and benchmarking your code. To accommodate a variety of allocation sizes on Alpine, CURC offers two application-based tiers. The Ascent Allocation tier provides users with 450,000 SUs over a 12 month period. The Peak Allocation tier is aimed at projects that will consume between 450,000 and 7,500,000 SUs in a 12 month period. Please see our Allocations page for a comparison of tiers and instructions to apply.

Alpine is jointly funded by the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Colorado Anschutz, Colorado State University, and the National Science Foundation (award 2201538).