HPC Resource Centre of VUB#
Message of the Day
16/05/2025 - New compute nodes added to Hydra
We’re excited to announce the immediate availability of a brand new compute partition in Hydra. This partition is called
zen5_mpi
and it has 20 nodes with 128 CPU cores each and 768 of RAM memory, which results in a large 6GB of memory per core that matches the zen4 partition.
Quick Reference Documentation#
The quick reference documentation offers structured and concise information for the day-to-day use of the HPC services at VUB. It focuses on our tier-2 cluster Hydra and covers all levels of expertise, from the VSC account creation to software optimization tips. Our documentation centre is also a point of entry to the extensive documentation available on the VSC documentation website.



Recent News#
16/05 - New compute nodes added to Hydra
We’re excited to announce the immediate availability of a brand new compute partition in Hydra. This partition is called
zen5_mpi
and it has 20 nodes with 128 CPU cores each and 768 of RAM memory, which results in a large 6GB of memory per core that matches the zen4 partition.09/04 - VUB Firewall upgrade on 10 April 2025
The update has been postponed to April 14 between 08:00 and 10:00.
17/03 - Minor system upgrade of Hydra
On Friday, March 21, at 06:00 CET we will carry out a minor system upgrade of the login nodes. During this upgrade, Hydra will be unavailable to users for approximately 30 minutes. All user sessions on the login nodes will be disconnected, but running jobs will not be impacted.
11/03 - New OnDemand web portal for HPC
We’re happy to announce the public release of our new VUB OnDemand web portal at https://portal.hpc.vub.be .
18/12 - Tier-1 data introduction training on January 17, 2025
On the 17th of January, the VSC organizes an online introduction training for Tier-1 Data, the VSC’s data management platform.
Latest Events#
Hydra Surveys and Stats#
Once a year we do a review of the usage of the cluster in the previous year. We carry out a user survey to gather feedback about your experience in our HPC clusters and collect usage data to analyse user activity on the clusters themselves.
The questions of the survey cover the full cycle of cluster usage, from getting access to the specific infrastructure needs of experienced users. The goal is to identify the weak and strong points in our scientific computing services as guidance for improvement in the future.
Our Hydra Overview 2023 show a very good satisfaction level of our users with the services provided by the SDC team. It also sheds light on some challenges and interesting trends for the future of the cluster.
All published reviews can be found in the survey list.