VUB Scientific Data & Compute#
Message of the Day
17/02/2026 - Network upgrade on scratch
14:00 The upgrade operation has been completed ahead of schedule. All new components were successfully installed. The job queue in Hydra is again accepting jobs.
Quick Reference Guide#
This quick reference guide offers structured, concise information for the daily use of our Tier-2 HPC clusters and Pixiu, our Research Data storage platform. The compute section covers best practices for using the HPC clusters, serving all levels of expertise, from VSC account creation to software optimization tips. It also acts as an entry point to the comprehensive resources available on the VSC documentation website.
Recent News#
17/02 - Network upgrade on scratch
14:00 The upgrade operation has been completed ahead of schedule. All new components were successfully installed. The job queue in Hydra is again accepting jobs.
10/02 - 18,20/3/2026: Linux and HPC Introduction Trainings
We are pleased to announce on-site Linux and HPC introductions on the VUB Health campus in Jette, in cooperation with the Vlaams Supercomputer Centrum (VSC).
05/02 - New GPU nodes added to Hydra
We’re happy to announce the public availability of hopper_gpu, a brand new GPU partition in Hydra. This partition features 5 nodes, each equipped with 2 NVIDIA H200 GPUs (140 GB VRAM) and 48 CPU cores.
04/02 - User limits on Anansi
We have added new limits to the number of CPU cores and GPU resources a single user can request across all jobs on the interactive/debug cluster Anansi. The aim is to improve queueing times and to avoid situations where a single user submits many jobs and uses up the resources of Anansi, effectively blocking other users from starting their session on OnDemand or batch jobs.
27/01 - Upgrade to Rocky Linux 9.7
We are upgrading the OS and Slurm scheduler on Hydra and Anansi starting Tuesday, January 27. The rollout will start Tuesday night. User impact is minimal: there will be no downtime, and your running or queued jobs will remain unaffected.
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 Overview for 2024 shows 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.