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The AI.Panther HPC Cluster at Florida Tech is a Aspen Systems cluster, comprised of 16 compute nodes (Total of 768 processor cores and 6,144 GB RAM), 12 GPU nodes, 3 VDI nodes, 3 storage nodes, 1 login node, 1 head node, and a DDN ExaScaler storage system. Eight of the GPU nodes contain 4 NVIDIA A100 GPUs each, and four of the GPU nodes contain 8 NVIDIA H200 GPUs each. The AI.Panther cluster was initially funded by the National Science Foundation major Research Implementation grant and expanded through a NIST ASCEND grant.
A HPC Cluster is a set of computers working in parallel performing similar to a supercomputer for a fraction of the price. The HPC Cluster is made up of a cluster of nodes connected by a high-speed network that perform intense computing tasks.
To learn about High Performance Computing or Supercomputers, see Wikipedia.
Hardware
Head Node
Login Node
A100 PCIe GPU Nodes
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4 x AMD EPYC 7402P Rome, 2.8 GHz 24-Core CPUs
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32 x 32 = 1024GB RAM
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4 x 960GB Enterprise SSD
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16 x NVIDIA Tesla Ampere A100 40GB Memory, PCIe
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24 x A100 NVLink Bridge
A100 SXM4 GPU Nodes
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8 x AMD EPYC 7402 Rome, 2.8 GHz 24-Core CPUs
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64 x 32 = 2048GB RAM
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4 x 960GB Enterprise SSD
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16 x NVIDIA Tesla Ampere A100 40GB Memory, 4 baseboards with 4 A100s with NVLINK
H200 SXM GPU Nodes
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4 x Dell PowerEdge XE9680 GPU compute nodes
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8 x Intel Xeon Platinum 8562Y+, 32-Core CPUs
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128 x 96 = 12,288GB RAM
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4 x Dell Boss-N1 NVMe (960 GB usable, OS device)
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16 x Dell NVMe ISE PS1010 RI U.2 3.84 TB (node-local NVMe)
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32 x NVIDIA H200 141GB Memory, 4 nodes with 8 H200s with NVLINK
VDI Nodes (Launching Fall 2026)
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3 x Dell PowerEdge R760xa
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6 x Intel Xeon Platinum 8568Y+, 2.3 GHz 48-Core CPUs
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44 x 96 = 4,224 GB DDR5-5600 RAM
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3 x Dell BOSS-N1 NVMe (894 GB usable, OS device)
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24 x 7 TB Dell U.2 NVMe (8 per node, RAID-Z1 ZFS pool of 7 + 1 hot spare per host, ~41 TB usable per host)
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12 x NVIDIA L40S 48GB Memory
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Open OnDemand web portal for interactive sessions and virtual desktops
High Memory Compute Nodes
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32 x Intel Xeon Cascade Lake Gold 6240R, 2.4GHz, 24-Core CPUs
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192 x 32 = 6144GB RAM
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16 x 960GB Enterprise SSD
ZFS User/Home Fileserver (78TB after overhead) - /home1
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2 x Intel Xeon Cascade Lake Silver 4215R, 3.20GHz, 8-Core CPUs
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12 x 16 = 192GB RAM
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2 x 240GB Enterprise SSD
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8 x 14TB SAS HDD configured as RAIDZ2
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2 x P4800X 375GB Optane SSDs
ZFS Archive Fileserver (420TB after overhead) - /archive
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2 x Intel Xeon Cascade Lake Silver 4215R, 3.20GHz, 8-Core CPUs
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12 x 32 = 384GB RAM
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2 x 240GB Enterprise SSD
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36 x 16TB SATA HDD configured as four RAIDZ2 arrays
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2 x P4800X 375GB Optane SSDs
DDN AI /HPC Storage System (Project/Shared Scratch) - /shared
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DDN AI400X2 All Flash Appliance Bundle
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24 x NVMe slots with 2x SE2420 enclosures (48 x NVMe slots)
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8 x NDR200 / 200GbE QSFP112 ports
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~1 PiB usable capacity
Network Switches
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One NVIDIA NDR Infiniband switch (MQM9700-NS2R) for H200 GPU Nodes and DDN Storage
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One Mellanox/NVIDIA HDR IB switch for CPU and A100 GPU Nodes
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One managed 1GbE switch
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One 25Gb (18 port)/100Gb (4 port) Ethernet switch
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Nodes have 25Gb Ethernet connection to the 25GbE switch (Dual Port 1GbE with IPMI, HDR100 IB Connection); H200 GPU Nodes and VDI Nodes use NDR IB Connection. 100GbE links from 25GbE switch are available for future expansion
NVIDIA AI Enterprise
NVIDIA AI Enterprise, a software suite for developing and deploying AI and machine learning workloads, is planned for deployment on the cluster in Fall 2026. It will provide researchers with optimized, supported frameworks, pretrained models, and tools for GPU-accelerated AI development.