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Main differences on Cirrus EX4000

Important

This information was last updated on 20 Nov 2025

This section provides an overview of the main differences between the current Cirrus system and Cirrus EX4000 along with links to more information where appropriate. It will be udated with more information as it becomes available.

Hardware

  • There are no GPU nodes on Cirrus EX4000
  • There are 288 cores on a Cirrus EX4000 compute node rather than 36 on current Cirrus
  • Cirrus EX4000 will use the HPE Cray Slingshot 11 interconnect rather than the Infiniband interconnect used on current Cirrus

Software

  • The software environment will completely change to be based on the HPE Cray Programming Environment - no modules that were available on old Cirrus system will be available in the same way on the new Cirrus system. We will update the documentation to cover these changes in detail ahead of the switch between systems.

Slurm scheduler configuration

  • Many of the partitions and QoS will be similar between the two systems but limits will change. These will be documented in more detail ahead of the switch.