Prospero specifications

The Prospero facility is comprised of two “islands”, Prospero-I and Prospero-II. Prospero-I, commissioned in 2020, is based primarily on HPE Apollo 2000 shared infrastructure chassis, each of which hosts up to four HPE XL225 compute nodes. Prospero-I includes a GPU-accelerated partition comprised of a single Apollo 6500 chassis, hosting a single server with four GPU engines.

Prospero-II, commissioned in 2025, is based on HPE Cray XD2000 shared infrastructure chassis, each of which hosts four HPE Cray XD225 compute nodes.

As of Q3/2025, Prospero comprises over 5000 compute cores and provides approximately 45 million core hours per year to the LJMU research community.

Prospero-II

Standard compute node specification:

  • HPE Cray XD225v server

  • 2x AMD EPYC 64-core processors (9534 2.45GHz)

  • 768GB DDR4-3200 memory

  • 15TB NVMe SSD local storage

  • HDR200 Infiniband network interface

Currently Prospero-II comprises 4 such chassis with 13 compute nodes.

Prospero-I

Standard compute node specification:

  • HPE ProLiant XL225n Gen10+ server

  • 2x AMD EPYC 32-core processors (7502 2.5GHz in 36 nodes, 7513 2.6GHz in 16 nodes)

  • 512GB DDR4-3200 memory

  • 480GB SATA SSD local storage

  • HDR100 Infiniband network interface

Combined performance of all 52 Prospero-I nodes is 84.7 Tflops.

  • Single node performance of 1.9 Tflops for the EPYC2 nodes.

  • Single node performance of 1.75 Tflops for the EPYC3 nodes.

Memory-rich compute nodes specification:

High mem node1

  • HPE ProLiant XL385 Gen10+ server

  • 2x AMD EPYC 7502 2.6GHz 32-core processors

  • 1.5TB DDR4-3200 memory

  • 480GB SATA SSD local storage

  • HDR100 Infiniband network interface

High mem node2

  • HPE ProLiant XL385 Gen10+ server

  • 2x AMD EPYC 7763 2.45GHz 64-core processors

  • 2.0TB DDR4-3200 memory

  • 480GB SATA SSD local storage

  • HDR100 Infiniband network interface

GPU accelerated node specification:

  • HPE ProLiant XL675 Gen10+ server

  • 2x AMD EPYC 7262 8-core 3.2GHz processors

  • 1.0TB DDR4-3200 memory

  • 4x NVIDIA A100 80GB accelerator

  • 1.9TB SATA SSD local storage

  • HDR100 Infiniband network interface

Networked storage

  • General purpose:

    • HPE ClusterStor parallel storage with 3.6PB (/mnt/scratch)

    • HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10+ storage with 250TB (/mnt/data1)

  • ARI use:

    • HPE Apollo 4200 Gen10+ storage server with 250TB in RAID6 (/mnt/aridata1)