Important

This documentation covers the new GABA cluster, available since November 27th, 2025.

Brain Research

Name of the clusters:

GABA

Institution:

Max Planck Institute for Brain Research

Login nodes:

  • gaba[11-15].bc.mpcdf.mpg.de

Hardware Configuration:

Login nodes gaba[11-15]:

  • CPUs Model : AuthenticAMD EPYC 9554 64-Core Processor

  • 2 sockets per node; 64 cores per socket; hyper-threading is on

  • RAM : 768 GB

  • GPUs : 4 Nvidia L40s-48GB GPUs per node

29 execution nodes gabag[201-229] for parallel CPU and GPU computing (3712 CPU cores) :

  • CPUs Model : AuthenticAMD EPYC 9554 64-Core Processor

  • 2 sockets per node; 64 cores per socket; hyper-threading is on

  • RAM : 768 GB

  • GPUs : 4 Nvidia L40s-48GB GPUs per node

Node interconnect is based on 25 Gb/s Ethernet

Filesystems:

/u

shared home filesystem with user home directory in /u/<username>; user quotas enforced (200GB data, 512K files)

/oldgaba

former $HOME filesystem (formerly known as /gaba ), read-only, only available on login nodes. NO BACKUPS anylonger!

/gabaghi

filesystem for archive (458 TB); only available on login nodes

/conndata

shared filesystem filesystem; no quotas enforced. NO BACKUPS!

/connscratch

shared filesystem filesystem; no quotas enforced. NO BACKUPS!

/tmpscratch

shared filesystem filesystem; no quotas enforced. NO BACKUPS!

/wKlive

filesystem for live wKcubes project; only available on login nodes NO BACKUPS!

/nexus/posix0

only available on gaba14 for data transfers to/from HPC systems

Compilers and Libraries:

The “module” subsystem is implemented on GABA. Please use ‘module available’ to see all available modules.

Batch system based on Slurm:

  • login nodes: gaba[11-15]; batch nodes: gabag[201-229]

  • sbatch, srun, squeue, sinfo, scancel, scontrol, s*

  • current default turnaround time (wallclock) is 24 hours and max. turnaround time is 100 hours

Useful tips (slurm part of cluster):

By default run time limit used for jobs that don’t specify a value is 24 hours. Use --time option for sbatch/srun to set a limit on the total run time of the job allocation but not longer than 100 hours

Default memory per node is 50G. To grant the job access to all of the memory on each node use --mem=0 option for sbatch/srun

The OpenMP codes require a variable OMP_NUM_THREADS to be set. This can be obtained from the Slurm environment variable $SLURM_CPUS_PER_TASK which is set when --cpus-per-task is specified in a sbatch script.

To use GPUs add in your slurm scripts --gres option and choose how many GPUs and/or which model of them to have: #SBATCH --gres=gpu:l40s:1
Valid gres options are: gpu[[:type]:count]
where
type is a type of gpu (l40s)
count is a number of resources (<=4)

To check node features, general resources and scheduling weight of nodes use sinfo -O nodelist,features,gres,weight

For interactive jobs please use srun command:
srun --time=1-10 --mem=32G --gres=gpu:l40s:1 --pty bash -i -l
keep in mind that --pty option should be the last srun option.

Support:

For support please create a trouble ticket at the MPCDF helpdesk