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Context

Nef is Inria Sophia Antipolis Méditerranée research center multidomain scientific experimentation infrastructure for computation, storage and visualisation.

The platform relies on a cluster computing approach (several generations of high performance servers are combined to provide heterogeneous parallel architecture), fast network interconnect, high capacity storage and interconnection to Inria Sophia interactive visualisation platform.

Nef is a member infrastructure the UCA OPAL distributed computation mesocentre.

Nef is operated and mainly funded by Inria.

Nef gratefully benefits from CPER 2015-2020 funding from Région Sud Provence Alpes Côte d'Azur, French MESRI (Ministère de l'Education Nationale, de l'Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche) and CASA (Communauté d'Agglomération de Sophia Antipolis).

Usage

The platform is open for members of all Inria teams. Accounts can also be opened for academic and corporate partners of Inria Sophia research center teams.

It can be used for both parallel computations, GPU computation and sequential jobs, etc.

History

2021-01-30

shutdown and deprovisioning of nefgpu03 GPU node (old Carri Workstation from 2011)

2021-01-20

1 new Dell T640 GPU node nefgpu37 (4x RTX8000 total) with privileged access for the funding team

2020-01-10

2 new Dell T640 GPU node nefgpu{35-36} (8x RTX6000 total) with privileged access for the funding team

2019-11-22

1 new Dell T640 GPU node nefgpu34 (4x RTX6000) + 1 new Dell R740 GPU node nefgpu46 (2x Tesla V100 GPU) with privileged access for the funding team

2019-08-30

4 new Dell C6420 nodes nef054-nef057 (144 cores) ; 4 new Dell R740 GPU node nefgpu42-nefgpu45 (12x Tesla T4 GPU total)

2019-07-08

4 new Dell T640 GPU node nefgpu{30-33} (12x RTX2080 Ti + 4x Titan-RTX GPU total)

2019-06-27

/data refactoring and extension (>600TiB)

2019-05-17

1 new SuperMicro4029 GPU node nefgpu41 (4x V100 GPU 32GB with NVLink interco, 384GB CPU RAM, 4.8TB scratch)

2019-03-21

6 new Dell T640 GPU node nefgpu{24-29} (4x RTX2080Ti + 16x GTX1080 Ti + 2x Titan-X GPU total) with privileged access for the funding team

2018-04-23

1 new Dell R940 node nef053 (80 cores, 1TB RAM) ; 16 new Dell C6420 nodes nef037-nef052 (320 cores) ; 1 new Asus ESC8000g4 GPU node nefgpu40 (8x GTX1080 Ti) ; 3 new Dell T630 GPU node nefgpu18-nefgpu20 (12x GTX1080 Ti GPU total)

2018-04-09

5 new Dell T630 GPU nodes nefgpu{16-17,21-23} (20x GTX1080 Ti GPU total) with privileged access for the funding team

2018-03-13

system upgrade to CentOS 7.4

2017-06-30

5 new Dell T630 GPU nodes nefgpu11-nefgpu15 (8x GTX1080 + 10x GTX1080 Ti GPU total) with privileged access for the funding team

2016-11-28

1 new Dell R730 GPU node nefgpu01 (1x Tesla K80) with privileged access for the funding team

2016-06-30

5 new Dell T630 GPU nodes nefgpu07-nefgpu11 (12x Titan-X GPU total) with privileged access for the funding team

2016-03-29

Slides of the nef introduction presentation are available

2016-03-16

new nef configuration is now the operational platform, legacy nef configuration shutdowns on 2016-04-17

2015-10-09

8 new Dell C6220 nodes nef029-nef036 (128 cores with 16GB RAM/core), /home extension (now 15 TiB), /data extension with reserved space for contributing teams

2015-09-04

new nef configuration is open for beta test : 840 additional cores, 60TB BeeGFS storage, OAR scheduler, nodes under CentOS7

2014-07-17

16 new machines added nef013-028 (320 new cores)

2013-11-21

new NFS server for home directories (7TB available instead of 1.3TB)

2013-06-18

6 new machines added nef007-012 (384 new cores), PGI 13.5 installed.

2013-04-22

memory upgrade on nef001-006 (from 128GB to 256GB)

2012-12-06

software upgrade (fedora 16, PGI 12.6, CUDA 5.0, ...)

2011-07-07

software upgrade (fedora 14, PGI 11.5, CUDA 4.0, ...)

2011-02-03

8 new machines added, major software upgrade (Fedora 12, PGI 11.1, openmpi 1.4.3 ...). QDR Infiniband network instead of myrinet

2010-03-12

software upgrade (openmpi 1.4.1, PGI 10.3, ...)

2009-06-09

major software upgrade (from Fedora 7 to Fedora 10)

2009-02-20

GPU cluster available for tests : two nodes with Fedora 10 and 4 Nvidia GPUs

2008-02-28

19 new machines added, minor software upgrade (PGI 7.1 and openmpi 1.2.5)

2007-08-16

major software upgrade (from Rocks to Fedora 7)

2007-01-30

32 new nef machines added

2005-06-20

Slides on How to use Sophia's cluster are available

2005-03-09

The nef cluster is online! This platform includes one frontend and 32 compute nodes (dual opterons)