National Compute Resource

Hardware

Baskerville NCR comprises 22 GPU nodes (25 including University of Birmingham-owned nodes), plus 6 CPU-only nodes, all connected via high-speed InfiniBand NDR networking.

GPU nodes

NVIDIA B200 GPUper GPU
Form Factor
SXM6
GPU Memory
180 GB HBM3e
GPU Memory Bandwidth
8 TB/s
Total Graphics Power (TGP)
1,000 W
Interconnect
NVLink: 900 GB/s, PCIe Gen 5: 128 GB/s
FP64
40 teraFLOPS
FP64 Tensor Core
40 teraFLOPS
FP32
80 teraFLOPS
TF32 Tensor Core
1.1 / 2.2 petaFLOPS
BFLOAT16 Tensor
2.25 / 4.5 petaFLOPS
FP16 Tensor Core
2.25 / 4.5 petaFLOPS
FP8 Tensor Core
4.5 / 9 petaFLOPS
INT8 Tensor Core
4.5 / 9 petaOPS

Each GPU node contains:

  • 8× NVIDIA B200 GPUs — each with 180 GB RAM, giving 1.44 TB HBM3e GPU RAM per node
  • 96 CPU cores — dual 48-core Intel Xeon Emerald Rapids (2.3 GHz base, 4.0 GHz boost)
  • 2 TB system RAM
  • 12 TB fast local NVMe scratch storage
  • 400 Gb/s InfiniBand NDR — 4 cards per node
  • Liquid cooling — 4 internal water loops per node, one each for:
    • front 4 GPUs
    • rear 4 GPUs
    • CPU pair
    • NVLink switch

Each node weighs approximately 100 kg.

CPU-only nodes

6 CPU-only nodes are available, each with 1 TB RAM, for memory-intensive workloads that do not require GPU acceleration.

Storage

The system provides approximately 4.3 PB of usable all-NVMe capacity, combining:

  • 48 × 30 TB TLC drives
  • 48 × 122 TB QLC drives