Technical Summary
The Expanse is a TV series based on the book series of the same name by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (under the pseudonym James S.A. Corey), who also serve among the show's producers and writers. The series is produced by Alcon Entertainment and premiered online through several VOD services on November 23, 2015 1, and premiered on Syfy in. Expanse provides the most complete inventory of your Internet assets by discovering Internet-exposed systems and services that no other solution can. Our data have extremely low false-positive and false-negative rates. With continuous and accurate discovery, you can rest easy knowing you have true visibility into your full Internet attack surface. The Expanse is genuinely the best TV science fiction I've seen in years. Four episodes in and so far I literally have no complaints about it. For a TV show about a book that I really enjoyed, it's hard to describe how unlikely that is. The show doesn't treat you like an idiot.
Expanse is a dedicated eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) cluster designed by Dell and SDSC delivering 5.16 peak petaflops, and will offer Composable Systems and Cloud Bursting.
Expanse's standard compute nodes are each powered by two 64-core AMD EPYC 7742 processors and contain 256 GB of DDR4 memory, while each GPU node contains four NVIDIA V100s (32 GB SMX2) connected via NVLINK and dual 20-core Intel Xeon 6248 CPUs. Expanse also has four 2 TB large memory nodes.
Expanse is organized into 13 SDSC Scalable Compute Units (SSCUs), comprising 728 standard nodes, 54 GPU nodes and 4 large-memory nodes. Every Expanse node has access to a 12 PB Lustre parallel file system (provided by Aeon Computing) and a 7 PB Ceph Object Store system. Expanse uses the Bright Computing HPC Cluster management system and the SLURM workload manager for job scheduling.
Expanse supports the XSEDE core software stack, which includes remote login, remote computation, data movement, science workflow support, and science gateway support toolkits.
Expanse is an NSF-funded system operated by the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego, and is available through the XSEDE program.
NEW! The Expanse User Portal is a gateway for launching interactive applications such as MATLAB, and an integrated web-based environment for file management and job submission. All Expanse users with XSEDE accounts have access via their XSEDE credentials.
Resource Allocation Policies
- The maximum allocation for a Principle Investigator on Expanse is 15M core-hours and 100K GPU hours. Limiting the allocation size means that Expanse can support more projects, since the average size of each is smaller.
- Access via Science Gateways can request more than the 15M core-hour limit.
Job Scheduling Policies
- The maximum allowable job size on Expanse is 4,096 cores – a limit that helps shorten wait times since there are fewer nodes in idle state waiting for large number of nodes to become free.
- Expanse supports long-running jobs - run times can be extended to one week. Users requests will be evaluated based on number of jobs and job size.
- Expanse supports shared-node jobs (more than one job on a single node). Many applications are serial or can only scale to a few cores. Allowing shared nodes improves job throughput, provides higher overall system utilization, and allows more users to run on Expanse.
Technical Details
| System Component | Configuration |
|---|---|
| Compute Nodes | |
| CPU Type | AMD EPYC 7742 |
| Nodes | 728 |
| Sockets | 2 |
| Cores/socket | 64 |
| Clock speed | 2.25 GHz |
| Flop speed | 4608 GFlop/s |
| Memory capacity | * 256 GB DDR4 DRAM |
| Local Storage | 1TB Intel P4510 NVMe PCIe SSD |
| Max CPU Memory bandwidth | 409.5 GB/s |
| GPU Nodes | |
| GPU Type | NVIDIA V100 SMX2 |
| Nodes | 52 |
| GPUs/node | 4 |
| CPU Type | Xeon Gold 6248 |
| Cores/socket | 20 |
| Sockets | 2 |
| Clock speed | 2.5 GHz |
| Flop speed | 34.4 TFlop/s |
| Memory capacity | *384 GB DDR4 DRAM |
| Local Storage | 1.6TB Samsung PM1745b NVMe PCIe SSD |
| Max CPU Memory bandwidth | 281.6 GB/s |
| Large-Memory | |
| CPU Type | AMD EPYC 7742 |
| Nodes | 4 |
| Sockets | 2 |
| Cores/socket | 64 |
| Clock speed | 2.25 GHz |
| Flop speed | 4608 GFlop/s |
| Memory capacity | 2 TB |
| Local Storage | 3.2 TB (2 X 1.6 TB Samsung PM1745b NVMe PCIe SSD) |
| STREAM Triad bandwidth | ~310 GB/sec |
| Full System | |
| Total compute nodes | 728 |
| Total compute cores | 93,184 |
| Total GPU nodes | 52 |
| Total V100 GPUs | 208 |
| Peak performance | 5.16 PFlop/s |
| Total memory | 247 TB |
| Total memory bandwidth | 215 TB/s |
| Total flash memory | 824 TB |
| HDR InfiniBand Interconnect | |
| Topology | Hybrid Fat-Tree |
| Link bandwidth | 56 Gb/s (bidirectional) |
| Peak bisection bandwidth | 8.5 TB/s |
| MPI latency | 1.17-1.69 µs |
| DISK I/O Subsystem | |
| File Systems | NFS, Ceph |
| Lustre Storage(performance) | 12 PB |
| Ceph Storage | 7 PB |
| I/O bandwidth (performance disk) | 140 GB/s, 200K IOPs |
Systems Software Environment
| Software Function | Description |
|---|---|
| Cluster Management | Bright Cluster Manager |
| Operating System | CentOS Linux |
| File Systems | Lustre, Ceph |
| Scheduler and Resource Manager | SLURM |
| XSEDE Software | CTSS |
| User Environment | Lmod |
| Compilers | AOCC, GCC, Intel, PGI |
| Message Passing | Intel MPI, MVAPICH, Open MPI |
The Expanse may have only just finished airing on Amazon Prime Video, but the show has already been renewed for Season 6. However, the sixth season, which is expected to be released this year, is set to be the show's last according to Amazon, who have started to reveal hints about the upcoming installment's cast and plot.
When is The Expanse Season 6 out?
No official release date has been announced yet for The Expanse Season 6. However, the previous two seasons on Amazon Prime came out in December, so a likely release date is December 2021, when the final 10 episodes are expected to start airing weekly.
In November 2020, Deadline reported that filming was expected to start on January 20, 2021. This was then pushed back to January 27, with filming set to last until April.
In mid-January, director of photography Jeremy Benning posted a picture of his lanyard for The Expanse Season 6 with the caption 'getting in the zone' on his Instagram story. This suggests that filming will be able to start very shortly if it has not done so already.
Who is in the cast of The Expanse Season 6?
All but one of The Expanse main cast are expected to return for Season 6. This includes Steven Strait as James Holden, Dominique Tipper as Naomi Nagata, Wes Chatham as Amon Burton, Shohreh Aghdashloo as Chrisjen Avasarala, and Frankie Adams as Bobbie Draper.
Leaving the cast will be Cas Anvar, who will not be returning as Alex Kamal after the actor has accused of sexual harassment and assault by multiple women who met Anvar at fan conventions. Though Anvar denied the claims, it was revealed he would not be returning to the show after an independent investigation was conducted.
This will be no surprise to viewers of the current season finale, who saw (spoiler alert) Alex die of a stroke after one high burn too many.
Posobiec The Expanse
What will The Expanse Season 6 be about?
Thought The Expanse may be ending after Season 6, the show is based on a series of nine books, the first five of which has been the basis of a season apiece.
Season 6, therefore, will be based on the sixth of James SA Corey's books, Babylon's Ashes. Daniel Abraham, who is one half on the writing dup behind the Corey pen name, confirmed to Inverse, 'the sixth season of the show is not going to include material from books 7, 8, and 9.'
The synopsis for the sixth book gives fans an idea of what to expect from the new season. It reads: 'A revolution brewing for generations has begun in fire. It will end in blood.
'The Free Navy—a violent group of Belters in black-market military ships—has crippled the Earth and begun a campaign of piracy and violence among the outer planets. The colony ships heading for the thousand new worlds on the far side of the alien ring gates are easy prey, and no single navy remains strong enough to protect them.
'James Holden and his crew know the strengths and weaknesses of this new force better than anyone. Outnumbered and outgunned, the embattled remnants of the old political powers call on the Rocinante for a desperate mission to reach Medina Station at the heart of the gate network.
'But the new alliances are as flawed as the old, and the struggle for power has only just begun. As the chaos grows, an alien mystery deepens. Pirate fleets, mutiny and betrayal may be the least of the Rocinante's problems. And in the uncanny spaces past the ring gates, the choices of a few damaged and desperate people may determine the fate of more than just humanity.'
Is there a trailer for The Expanse Season 6?
So far, there is no promo, and one is not expected until at least fall 2020—though fans may get a first glimpse of footage at San Diego Comic-Con in the summer if the event goes ahead this year.
Is Season 6 really the end of The Expanse?
The Expanse Season 7
Season 6 will be the last season of the show to air on Amazon Prime Video, but its creators have hinted there is more to come—especially as the show has already been brought back once before after being cancelled by SyFy.
For example, the other Expanse co-write Ty Franck has said to Polygon: 'Alcon [Television Group]—our studio—is very committed to the IP. They have lots of plans. We'll see what happens after that.'
Showrunner Naren Shankar, who will return for Season 6, told Entertainment Weekly: 'What I will say is that there's definitely more to tell and I'm sure Ty and Daniel would say exactly the same thing. But yeah, that's probably about as much as I can say at this point.'
Expanse Season 6
The Expanse Season 6 is coming soon to Amazon Prime Video.
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