VUB Scientific Data & Compute#
Message of the Day
07/11/2025 - Last goodbye to the Skylake partition
The last skylake nodes will be decommissioned on Monday (November 10th) to make room for new GPU nodes.
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#
07/11 - Last goodbye to the Skylake partition
The last skylake nodes will be decommissioned on Monday (November 10th) to make room for new GPU nodes.
29/09 - HPC Training season is approaching at VUB
This fall the HPC team of VUB organizes in collaboration with VSC a variety of trainings for new and experienced users on supercomputing. We encourage you to check the contents of those trainings and participate in any that fits your interests. Registration is free for all of them.
12/09 - Hydra security shutdown
Access to Hydra is open again: both the portal and the login nodes are now online.
17/07 - Upgrade to Rocky Linux 9 and decommissioning Skylakes
The upgrade to Rocky Linux 9.5 is now complete.
20/06 - Hydra Overview 2024
In the year 2024 a lot of time was spent on the tender processes to procure the next VSC Tier-1 supercomputer hosted by VUB. Nevertheless our Tier-2 HPC cluster Hydra did undergo several key changes. It’s time for some statistics on the usage of the infrastructure on 2024.
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.