All Products
Search
Document Center

Elastic High Performance Computing:Limits

Last Updated:May 19, 2025

Specific limits are posed on Elastic High Performance Computing (E-HPC) features and service performance. Before you use E-HPC, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with the corresponding limits, plan in advance, and apply for higher quotas to ensure that E-HPC meets your business requirements. This topic describes the limits on E-HPC and how to apply for increases on these limits.

Regions and zones supported by E-HPC

The following table lists the regions and zones supported by Elastic High Performance Computing (E-HPC). The regions and zones displayed on the Create Cluster page shall prevail.

Category

Region

Zones

Asia Pacific - China

China (Hangzhou)

Zone B, Zone E, Zone F, Zone G, Zone H, Zone I, Zone J, and Zone K

China (Shanghai)

Zone A, Zone B, Zone C, Zone D, Zone E, Zone F, Zone G, Zone K, Zone L, Zone M, and Zone N

China (Qingdao)

Zone B and Zone C

China (Beijing)

Zone A, Zone B, Zone C, Zone D, Zone E, Zone F, Zone G, Zone H, Zone I, Zone J, Zone K, and Zone L

China (Zhangjiakou)

Zone A, Zone B, and Zone C

China (Hohhot)

Zone A and Zone B

China (Ulanqab)

Zone A, Zone B, and Zone C

China (Shenzhen)

Zone A and Zone B

China (Heyuan)

Zone A and Zone B

China (Chengdu)

Zone A and Zone B

China (Hong Kong)

Zone B, Zone C, and Zone D

Asia Pacific - others

Japan (Tokyo)

Zone A, Zone B, and Zone C

Singapore

Zone A, Zone B, and Zone C

Indonesia (Jakarta)

Zone A, Zone B, and Zone C

Europe & Americas

Germany (Frankfurt)

Zone A, Zone B, and Zone C

Supported scheduler types

Schedulers are used to schedule jobs in a cluster. E-HPC supports the following types of schedulers:

Scheduler type

Description

SLURM

An open source, performant cluster management and job scheduling system widely used in Linux and Unix systems. The Slurm scheduler supports a wide variety of scheduling policies.

OpenPBS

An open source job scheduling system that supports various operating systems and provides job queue management and resource allocation features.

Grid Engine

An open source cluster scheduling system that supports complex job scheduling policies and advanced resource management features.

LSF-Plugin

A Load Sharing Facility (LSF) plug-in that extends the functionality of LSF to provide flexible job scheduling and management.

PBS Pro-Plugin

A plug-in for PBS Pro. PBS Pro is a commercial cluster management and job scheduling system. PSB Pro-Plugin enhances the functionality of PBS Pro and facilitates its integration with other systems.

Supported domain account services

Domain account services are used to manage cluster users. E-HPC supports the following domain account services:

  • Network Information Service (NIS) provides centralized identity management. You can create a user on the NIS server. After a new node is added to NIS, you can use the user to log on to the node without the need to create a user on each node.

  • Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is used to authenticate E-HPC users. You can authorize and group users by using LDAP to grant users different permissions.

Supported Images

An image includes the operating system and configuration data for your business. It is used to create the Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances that make up an E-HPC cluster. E-HPC supports the following types of images: public images, custom images, and community images. For more information, see Overview.

Important
  • Alibaba Cloud Linux, CentOS, and Ubuntu public and custom images are supported. The image types that you can select vary based on the region, instance type, and whether the current Alibaba Cloud account has available image resources. All available image types are displayed in the console.

    You can call the ListAvailableImages operation to learn the supported images.

    OS type

    Supported versions

    Alibaba Cloud Linux

    Alibaba Cloud Linux 3 Pro

    Alibaba Cloud Linux 3

    Alibaba Cloud Linux 2

    CentOS

    CentOS 7.2 to 7.9

    Ubuntu

    Ubuntu 22.04

    Ubuntu 20.04

  • The schedulers, domain account services, and supported shared storage and software vary based on images.

  • Public images: images provided by Alibaba Cloud.

  • Custom images: images created from ECS instances or snapshots, or images imported from your on-premises computer.

  • Community images: images that are released on the image platform of Alibaba Cloud Community.

Limits on accounts

Item

Limit

How to increase quota

Accounts that are used to create clusters

To create ECS instances within the Chinese mainland, you must first complete real-name verification.

None.

Limits on quotas

The following table describes the limits on the features of E-HPC in a single region.

Item

Quota

How to increase quota

Maximum number of clusters

3

Submit a ticket.

Maximum number of nodes in a cluster

500

Submit a ticket.

Maximum number of nodes that can be added at a time

99

None.

Maximum system disk size of a node

500 GiB

Submit a ticket.

Maximum number of compute nodes on which a single file system can be mounted

1000

None.

Maximum capacity of a single file system

  • Performance NAS file system: 1 PiB

  • Extreme NAS file system: 256 TiB

None.