This topic describes the features of Super Computing Cluster (SCC) instance families and lists the instance types of each family.
- scchfc6, compute optimized SCC instance family with high clock speed
- scchfg6, general purpose SCC instance family with high clock speed
- scchfr6, memory optimized SCC instance family with high clock speed
- scch5, SCC instance family with high clock speed
- sccg5, general purpose SCC instance family
- sccgn6, compute optimized SCC instance family with GPU capabilities
Introduction
SCCs are based on ECS Bare Metal Instance. With the high-speed interconnects of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) technology, SCCs greatly improve network performance and the acceleration ratio of large-scale clusters. Therefore, SCCs have all the benefits of ECS Bare Metal Instance and can provide high-quality network performance that features high bandwidth and low latency.
SCCs are used to meet the demands of applications such as high performance computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, scientific and engineering computing, data analysis, and audio and video processing. In the clusters, nodes are connected over RDMA networks that feature high bandwidth and low latency. This ensures the parallel efficiency of applications in areas such as high performance computing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. The RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) rivals an InfiniBand network in terms of connection speed and can support more Ethernet-based applications.
The combination of SCCs and other Alibaba Cloud computing services such as ECS and Elastic GPU Service provides E-HPC with the ultimate high performance parallel computing resources, making supercomputing on the cloud possible.
Comparison of SCCs, physical machines, and virtual machines
The following table compares the features of SCCs, physical machines, and virtual machines. In this table, Y means supported, N means not supported, and N/A means not applicable.
| Feature type | Feature | SCC | Physical machine | Virtual machine |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Automated O&M | Delivery within minutes | Y | N | Y |
| Compute | Zero performance loss | Y | Y | N |
| Zero feature loss | Y | Y | N | |
| Zero resource preemption | Y | Y | N | |
| Storage | Compatible with ECS disks | Y | N | Y |
| Startup from system disks | Y | N | Y | |
| Quick reset of system disks | Y | N | Y | |
| Use of ECS images | Y | N | Y | |
| Cold migration between physical and virtual machines | Y | N | Y | |
| No need to install the operating system | Y | N | Y | |
| No need of local Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks (RAID), and better protection of data in disks | Y | N | Y | |
| Network | Compatible with ECS VPCs | Y | N | Y |
| Compatible with the ECS classic network | Y | N | Y | |
| No communication bottlenecks between physical and virtual machine clusters in VPCs | Y | N | Y | |
| Management | Compatible with existing ECS management systems | Y | N | Y |
| Consistent user experience on features such as VNC with that on virtual machines | Y | N | Y | |
| Out-of-band (OOB) network security | Y | N | N/A |
scchfc6, compute optimized SCC instance family with high clock speed
To use this instance family, submit a ticket.
- I/O optimized.
- Supports enhanced SSDs (ESSDs), standard SSDs, and ultra disks.
- Supports both RoCE and VPCs, of which RoCE is dedicated to RDMA communication.
- Provides all the features of ECS Bare Metal Instance.
- Equipped with 3.1 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® Platinum 8269 (Cascade Lake) processors with a maximum turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz.
- Offers a CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:2.4.
- Scenarios:
- Large-scale machine learning training
- Large-scale high performance scientific computing and simulations
- Large-scale data analysis, batch processing, and video encoding
| Instance type | vCPU | Physical cores | Memory (GiB) | GPU | Bandwidth (Gbit/s) | Packet forwarding rate (Kpps) | RoCE (Gbit/s) | IPv6 support | NIC queues | ENIs (including one primary ENI) | Private IP addresses per ENI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ecs.scchfc6.20xlarge | 80 | 40 | 192.0 | None | 30.0 | 6,000 | 50 | Yes | 8 | 32 | 10 |
- ecs.scchfc6.20xlarge provides 80 logical processors on 40 physical cores.
- You can go to the ECS Instance Types Available for Each Region page to view the instance types available in each region.
- For more information about these specifications, see Instance specifications.
scchfg6, general purpose SCC instance family with high clock speed
To use this instance family, submit a ticket.
- I/O optimized.
- Supports enhanced SSDs, standard SSDs, and ultra disks.
- Supports both RoCE and VPCs, of which RoCE is dedicated to RDMA communication.
- Provides all the features of ECS Bare Metal Instance.
- Equipped with 3.1 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® Platinum 8269 (Cascade Lake) processors with a maximum turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz.
- Offers a CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:4.8.
- Scenarios:
- Large-scale machine learning training
- Large-scale high performance scientific computing and simulations
- Large-scale data analysis, batch processing, and video encoding
| Instance type | vCPU | Physical cores | Memory (GiB) | GPU | Bandwidth (Gbit/s) | Packet forwarding rate (Kpps) | RoCE (Gbit/s) | IPv6 support | NIC queues | ENIs (including one primary ENI) | Private IP addresses per ENI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ecs.scchfg6.20xlarge | 80 | 40 | 384.0 | None | 30.0 | 6,000 | 50 | Yes | 8 | 32 | 10 |
- ecs.scchfg6.20xlarge provides 80 logical processors on 40 physical cores.
- You can go to the ECS Instance Types Available for Each Region page to view the instance types available in each region.
- For more information about these specifications, see Instance specifications.
scchfr6, memory optimized SCC instance family with high clock speed
To use this instance family, submit a ticket.
- I/O optimized.
- Supports enhanced SSDs, standard SSDs, and ultra disks.
- Supports both RoCE and VPCs, of which RoCE is dedicated to RDMA communication.
- Provides all the features of ECS Bare Metal Instance.
- Equipped with 3.1 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® Platinum 8269 (Cascade Lake) processors with a maximum turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz.
- Offers a CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:9.6.
- Scenarios:
- Large-scale machine learning training
- Large-scale high performance scientific computing and simulations
- Large-scale data analysis, batch processing, and video encoding
| Instance type | vCPU | Physical cores | Memory (GiB) | GPU | Bandwidth (Gbit/s) | Packet forwarding rate (Kpps) | RoCE (Gbit/s) | IPv6 support | NIC queues | ENIs (including one primary ENI) | Private IP addresses per ENI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ecs.scchfr6.20xlarge | 80 | 40 | 768.0 | None | 30.0 | 6,000 | 50 | Yes | 8 | 32 | 10 |
- ecs.scchfr6.20xlarge provides 80 logical processors on 40 physical cores.
- You can go to the ECS Instance Types Available for Each Region page to view the instance types available in each region.
- For more information about these specifications, see Instance specifications.
scch5, SCC instance family with high clock speed
- I/O optimized.
- Supports only standard SSDs and ultra disks.
- Supports both RoCE and VPCs, of which RoCE is dedicated to RDMA communication.
- Provides all the features of ECS Bare Metal Instance.
- Equipped with 3.1 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® Gold 6149 (Skylake) processors.
- Offers a CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:3.
- Scenarios:
- Large-scale machine learning training
- Large-scale high performance scientific computing and simulations
- Large-scale data analysis, batch processing, and video encoding
| Instance type | vCPU | Physical cores | Memory (GiB) | GPU | Bandwidth (Gbit/s) | Packet forwarding rate (Kpps) | RoCE (Gbit/s) | IPv6 support | NIC queues | ENIs (including one primary ENI) | Private IP addresses per ENI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ecs.scch5.16xlarge | 64 | 32 | 192.0 | None | 10.0 | 4,500 | 25 × 2 | No | 8 | 32 | 10 |
- ecs.scch5.16xlarge provides 64 logical processors on 32 physical cores.
- You can go to the ECS Instance Types Available for Each Region page to view the instance types available in each region.
- For more information about these specifications, see Instance specifications.
sccg5, general purpose SCC instance family
- I/O optimized.
- Supports only standard SSDs and ultra disks.
- Supports both RoCE and VPCs, of which RoCE is dedicated to RDMA communication.
- Provides all the features of ECS Bare Metal Instance.
- Equipped with 2.5 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® Platinum 8163 (Skylake) processors.
- Offers a CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:4.
- Scenarios:
- Large-scale machine learning training
- Large-scale high performance scientific computing and simulations
- Large-scale data analysis, batch processing, and video encoding
| Instance type | vCPU | Physical cores | Memory (GiB) | GPU | Bandwidth (Gbit/s) | Packet forwarding rate (Kpps) | RoCE (Gbit/s) | IPv6 support | NIC queues | ENIs (including one primary ENI) | Private IP addresses per ENI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ecs.sccg5.24xlarge | 96 | 48 | 384.0 | None | 10.0 | 4,500 | 25 × 2 | No | 8 | 32 | 10 |
- ecs.sccg5.24xlarge provides 96 logical processors on 48 physical cores.
- You can go to the ECS Instance Types Available for Each Region page to view the instance types available in each region.
- For more information about these specifications, see Instance specifications.
sccgn6, compute optimized SCC instance family with GPU capabilities
- I/O optimized.
- Offers a CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:4.
- Equipped with 2.5 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® Platinum 8163 (Skylake) processors.
- Provides all the features of ECS Bare Metal Instance.
- Storage:
- Supports enhanced SSDs, standard SSDs, and ultra disks
- Supports a high performance CPFS
- Networking:
- Supports VPCs
- Supports the RoCE v2 network, which is dedicated to low-latency RDMA communication
- Uses NVIDIA V100 GPU processors that have the SXM2 module:
- Powered by the new NVIDIA Volta architecture
- Offers a 16 GB HBM2 GPU memory
- CUDA Cores 5120
- Tensor Cores 640
- Offers a GPU memory bandwidth of up to 900 GB/s
- Supports up to six NVLink connections and total bandwidth of 300 GB/s (25 GB/s per connection)
- Scenarios:
- Ultra-large-scale machine learning training on a distributed GPU cluster
- Large-scale high performance scientific computing and simulations
- Large-scale data analysis, batch processing, and video encoding
| Instance type | vCPU | Memory (GiB) | Local storage (GiB) | GPU | Bandwidth (Gbit/s) | Packet forwarding rate (Kpps) | RoCE (Gbit/s) | IPv6 support | NIC queues | ENIs (including one primary ENI) | Private IP addresses per ENI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ecs.sccgn6.24xlarge | 96 | 384.0 | None | V100*8 | 30 | 4,500 | 25 × 2 | Yes | 8 | 32 | 10 |
- You can go to the ECS Instance Types Available for Each Region page to view the instance types available in each region.
- For more information about these specifications, see Instance specifications.
Billing methods
SCCs support pay-as-you-go and subscription billing methods. For more information, see Comparison of billing methods.