On Vista, the login nodes provide access to the system for compiling, job submission, data transfer, etc. While the login nodes are configured similarly to the compute nodes, they are not intended to be used for computational jobs. Instead, they serve as your gateway to the rest of the system. The overall architecture of the Vista system is shown in the diagram below.

The extensive, interconnected array of compute nodes is intended for running large-scale jobs in batch or interactive mode. Compute nodes in the GG subsystem have one NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip consisting a pair of 72-core Grace processors, for a total of 144 cores per node. Compute nodes in the GH subsystem have one NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip consisting of an NVIDIA H100 GPU and a 72-core Grace CPU. We’ll look at the full details of these nodes shortly in the Compute Nodes section.

The NVIDIA NDR InfiniBand interconnect ties all these components to each other and to the various high-performance storage systems. Note that Vista's main file systems will be covered in a subsequent topic, Storing and Moving Data.