HPC Documentation

Guides, references, and tutorials for the WCM cluster

Overview

Seneca Cluster Documentation

The Seneca cluster is a High-Performance Computing (HPC) system jointly managed by Cornell’s Center for Advanced Computing (CAC), Weill Cornell Medicine Qatar Advanced Computing team (AdvC), and the Weill Cornell Medicine Scientific Computing Unit (SCU). It is available for research users with non-sensitive data.

The cluster features modern CPUs, NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, a BeeGFS parallel file system, and a 400 Gb NDR InfiniBand interconnect. It runs on Rocky Linux 9 and uses Slurm 25.05.3 for job scheduling.

Hardware and Networking

Servers:

NameCPU ThreadsRAMGPUs
seneca-login1641 TBN/A
c000[1-4]1281 TB4 x NVIDIA H100 80 GB SXM
c0005128512 GB2 x NVIDIA H100 80 GB PCIe
c000664128 GB2 x NVIDIA A100 40 GB PCIe
c01[01-08]2561 TBN/A
c01[09-12]256512 GBN/A

GPU Specifications

To access the GPUs, submit a Slurm job to the cac_gpu partition using the --gres option.

GPUStreaming MultiprocessorsMemoryCPU-to-GPU InterconnectNVLink
NVIDIA H100 80 GB SXM1323.35 TB/s (HBM3)128 GB/s PCIe Gen5900 GB/s (4 on same node)
NVIDIA H100 80 GB PCIe1142.0 TB/s (HBM2e)128 GB/s PCIe Gen5None
NVIDIA A100 40 GB PCIe1081.55 TB/s (HBM2)64 GB/s PCIe Gen4None

Note: Compared to the H100 PCIe, the H100 SXM offers slightly more compute power, significantly faster memory, and high-speed NVLink connections between GPUs on the same node.

Storage

Note: Storage systems on the Seneca cluster are not backed up.

  • User Home Directory: Each user has a home directory with a 100 GB default quota, accessed via ~.
  • BeeGFS Parallel File System: Each project has a directory at /mnt/beegfs/<institution>/<project name> readable/writable by project members. Institutions include ithaca, qatar, and weill.
  • Local Scratch: Mounted on /tmp on all nodes.

In addition to scp/sftp, storage is accessible via the Seneca Cluster Globus collection.

Request Access

For Weill Cornell Medicine Principal Investigators (PIs) requesting access to the Seneca cluster through the Scientific Computing Unit (SCU), please note that provisioning requires an active fund number and the completion of a data compliance review prior to resource allocation.

Cornell CAC & WCM SCU Seneca Cluster Documentation — 2026