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Introduction | introduction, home, welcome, architecture, design | 07 September 2022 | merlin6_sidebar | /merlin6/introduction.html |
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The Merlin local HPC cluster
Historically, the local HPC clusters at PSI were named Merlin. Over the years, multiple generations of Merlin have been deployed.
At present, the Merlin local HPC cluster contains two generations of it:
- the old Merlin5 cluster (
merlin5
Slurm cluster), and - the newest generation Merlin6, which is divided in two Slurm clusters:
merlin6
as the Slurm CPU clustergmerlin6
as the Slurm GPU cluster.
Access to the different Slurm clusters is possible from the Merlin login nodes, which can be accessed through the SSH protocol or the NoMachine (NX) service.
The following image shows the Slurm architecture design for the Merlin5 & Merlin6 (CPU & GPU) clusters:

Merlin6
Merlin6 is a the official PSI Local HPC cluster for development and mission-critical applications that has been built in 2019. It replaces the Merlin5 cluster.
Merlin6 is designed to be extensible, so is technically possible to add more compute nodes and cluster storage without significant increase of the costs of the manpower and the operations.
Merlin6 contains all the main services needed for running cluster, including login nodes, storage, computing nodes and other subservices, connected to the central PSI IT infrastructure.
CPU and GPU Slurm clusters
The Merlin6 computing nodes are mostly based on CPU resources. However, it also contains a small amount of GPU-based resources, which are mostly used by the BIO Division and by Deep Leaning project.
These computational resources are split into two different Slurm clusters:
- The Merlin6 CPU nodes are in a dedicated Slurm cluster called
merlin6
.- This is the default Slurm cluster configured in the login nodes: any job submitted without the option
--cluster
will be submited to this cluster.
- This is the default Slurm cluster configured in the login nodes: any job submitted without the option
- The Merlin6 GPU resources are in a dedicated Slurm cluster called
gmerlin6
.- Users submitting to the
gmerlin6
GPU cluster need to specify the option--cluster=gmerlin6
.
- Users submitting to the
Merlin5
The old Slurm CPU merlin cluster is still active and is maintained in a best effort basis.
Merlin5 only contains computing nodes resources in a dedicated Slurm cluster.
- The Merlin5 CPU cluster is called merlin5.