2025-09-01: Solaris subcluster in Maxwell

the solaris sub-cluster in Maxwell serves in particular non-demanding batch and interactive jobs.

We have recently added a bit of hardware and a number of services to solaris.

Hardware

solaris is kind of a retirement home for old hardware. Selected pieces of hardware have been retired in Maxwell, but can still serve some purpose in the solaris subcluster. We habe recently added P100 GPU nodes to solaris, as well as ARM-processors.

The P100 GPUs are ancient, and not supported with CUDA 13, but can still be used for developments and graphical applications suffering from memory and core limitations on the display nodes.

The ARM cpus are of type ARM ampere Neoverse-N1. The ARM processor has an entirely different architecture, and x86-software will hence not work. However, the ARM processors might still be useful for developments and tests.

Services

solaris meanwhile also comes with a portal exposing the same services as the Maxwell portal. It offers in particular a dedicated jupyterhub supporting all hardware platforms (cpus, gpus, arm).