Quest Technical Specifications
Northwestern has regularly invested in Quest to refresh and expand computing resources to meet the needs of the research community. This includes hundreds of nodes that are available free of charge as General Access resources, as well as Priority Access, purchased resources.
Quest Storage
Quest has an IBM GPFS parallel file system with ESS storage totaling approximately 12 PB. All users have access to a small (80 GB) home directory. Users may also request storage resources to gain access to a project directory optimized for high-performance computing operations.
Users with access to computing resources on Quest will automatically be allocated 5 TB of scratch space that can be used for temporary file storage. Backed by a 500 TB flash disk drive, scratch space provides very high performance for file operations. It is specific to the user’s NetID and cannot be expanded beyond 5 TB. Files that haven’t been modified within 30 days are automatically removed from the scratch space.
Users who are only utilizing Quest Analytics and no other compute resources will need to submit a ticket to quest-help@northwestern.edu requesting scratch space.
Compute Resources
Quest comprises 7 login nodes and over 1200 compute nodes, with a total of over 80,000 cores. These nodes include over 91 GPU nodes and 22 high-memory nodes. Both the login and compute nodes are running the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.10 operating system.
Regular Compute Nodes
Quest currently consists of the following architectures:
Quest 13 - Intel Emerald Rapids
- Number of Nodes: 140 nodes with 17920 cores total, 128 cores per node
- Processor: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8592+ CPU @ 1.9GHz
- Memory: Per node (per core) 512 GB (4 GB), Type: DDR5 5600 MHz
- Interconnect: Infiniband HDR
- Expected retirement: Spring 2030
Quest 12 - Intel Ice Lake
- Number of Nodes: 214 nodes with 13696 cores total, 64 cores per node
- Processor: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6338 CPU @ 2.0GHz
- Memory: Per node (per core) 256 GB (4 GB), Type: DDR4 3200 MHz
- Interconnect: Infiniband HDR
- Expected retirement: Fall 2028
Quest 11 - Intel Ice Lake
- Number of Nodes: 209 nodes with 13376 cores total, 64 cores per node
- Processor: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6338 CPU @ 2.0GHz
- Memory: Per node (per core) 256 GB (4 GB), Type: DDR4 3200 MHz
- Interconnect: Infiniband HDR Compatible
- Expected retirement: Fall 2027
Quest 10 - Intel Cascade Lake
- Number of Nodes: 555 nodes with 28860 cores total, 52 cores per node
- Processor: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6230 CPU @ 2.10GHz
- Memory: Per node (per core) 192 GB (3.7 GB), Type: DDR4 2933MHz
- Interconnect: Infiniband EDR
- Expected retirement: Fall 2026
GPU Nodes
Quest has a total of 269 GPU cards on 91 GPU nodes across General Access and Priority Access allocations. GPU resources available to General Access allocations:
Quest 13 - Intel Emerald Rapids with NVIDIA H100 GPUs
- Number of Nodes: 24 nodes with 1536 cores total, 64 cores per node
- Processor: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8562Y+ CPU @ 2.8 GHz (Emerald Rapids)
- Memory: Per node (Per Core) 1 TB (16 GB), Type: DDR5 5600 MHz
- GPU cards per node: 4 x 80 GB NVIDIA H100 (Connected with SXM5 and HBM3)
- Interconnect: Infiniband NDR
- Expected retirement: Fall 2029
Quest 12 - Intel Ice Lake with NVIDIA A100 GPUs
- Number of Nodes: 18 nodes with 1152 cores total, 64 cores per node
- Processor: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6338 CPU @ 2.0 GHz (Ice Lake)
- Memory: Per node (Per Core) 512 GB (8 GB), Type: DDR4 3200 MHz
- GPU cards per node: 4 x 80 GB NVIDIA A100 (Connected with SXM4 and HBM2)
- Interconnect: Infiniband HDR
- Expected retirement: Fall 2028
Quest 10 - Intel Cascade Lake with NVIDIA A100 GPUs
- Number of Nodes: 16 nodes with 832 cores total, 52 cores per node
- Processor: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6230 CPU @ 2.10 GHz (Cascade Lake)
- Memory: Per node (Per Core) 192 GB (3.7 GB), Type: DDR4 2933 MHz
- GPU cards per node: 2 x 40 GB NVIDIA A100 (Connected with PCIe)
- Expected retirement: Fall 2026
Quest GPU resources can support multiple versions of the modern CUDA Toolkit. More information is available in the Quest GPU documentation.
High-Memory Nodes
Quest has 4 General Access nodes, each with 52 cores and 1.5 TB memory. For more information on how to run jobs on a high-memory node, see Quest Partitions/Queues. High-memory nodes can be purchased for Priority Access on Quest.