Alpha hardware

Created by Robert Harrison, Modified on Fri, 18 Sep at 5:49 PM by Cesar Arias

ALPHA HARDWARE

Empire AI: Alpha Hardware Specifications

A full inventory of the compute, networking, and storage hardware behind the Alpha cluster.

Compute — 28 GPU nodes + 1 CPU node, 224 GPUs

24 HGX nodes

  • Nodes alphagpu01–18 — 8× H100 80GB GPUs per node
  • Nodes alphagpu19–24 — 8× H200 141GB GPUs per node
  • 10× 400Gb/s ConnectX-7 NIC cards per node (8 for InfiniBand, 2 for Ethernet)
  • 30TB NVMe caching space per node
  • 2TB of system memory per node

4 RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell nodes

  • Nodes alphagpu51–54 — 8× RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell ~96GB GPUs per node (32 total)
  • Part of the same general-access alpha partition as the H100/H200 nodes, reserved for single-GPU workloads — see the Job Submission and QoS Overview article for routing behavior

1 CPU node

  • Node alphacpu01 — 2× Intel Xeon Platinum 8568Y+ (96 cores total, x86_64), ~1TB RAM
  • Part of the dedicated cpu partition for CPU-only workloads

Grace-Grace

Grace-Grace shares the same BCM/Slurm instance as Alpha and is reachable via the grace partition.

60 Grace CPU nodes

  • Nodes betagg01–60 — 2× NVIDIA Grace (Neoverse-V2) sockets per node, 144 cores total, ARM (aarch64), ~480GB RAM per node
  • CPU-only, part of the grace partition

1 Grace Hopper node

  • Node alphagh01 — NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip: 1× Grace CPU (72 cores, ~573GB system memory) + 1× Hopper GPU (~96GB HBM3e)
  • Part of the grace partition, alongside the 60 Grace CPU nodes above

Networking

Non-blocking NDR fabric, cabled for rail configuration

  • 8 network switches, 96 optical connections

Service & access nodes

2 service nodes

  • 1 login nodes
  • 1 cluster management nodes (NVIDIA Base Command, licensed for all gear)

2 data transfer nodes

Storage — ~30PB total

~10PB of DDN storage (Lustre/EXAScaler)

  • Working/scratch tier for active training checkpoints

~20PB of VAST storage

  • Home directories (100GB/user hard quota) + project directories

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