VUB Scientific Data & Compute#
Message of the Day
18/02/2026 - VUB-HPC briefly offline on 23 February
Due to a scheduled firewall migration, the VUB-HPC clusters will be temporarily inaccessible on 23 February. This should not take longer than a few minutes. Users will be unable to access the clusters during the migration. Running jobs will continue to run, provided they do not require external internet access.
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#
23/02 - VUB HPC Overview 2025
2025 marked a year of strong growth and strategic preparation for the SDC team. While significant effort was invested in preparing for the next VSC Tier-1 Sofia , the Tier-2 infrastructure (Hydra and Anansi) continued to expand in usage, users, and services.
18/02 - VUB-HPC briefly offline on 23 February
Due to a scheduled firewall migration, the VUB-HPC clusters will be temporarily inaccessible on 23 February. This should not take longer than a few minutes. Users will be unable to access the clusters during the migration. Running jobs will continue to run, provided they do not require external internet access.
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.
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.