Infrastructure#

VUB-HPC is a member of the Vlaams Supercomputer Centrum (VSC), a partnership between the five Flemish universities and their university associations to provide HPC resources to the academic and industrial community in Flanders.

VSC Tier-2 clusters#

As a member of VSC, all researchers in VUB and UZ Brussel can access all Tier-2 clusters in the VSC network.

The full list of Tier-2 clusters is available in VSCdocTier-2 Hardware

VUB-HPC Tier-2 clusters#

VUB-HPC currently provides 2 Tier-2 clusters: Hydra, the main cluster for batch jobs, and Anansi, the cluster for interactive use and testing.

Hydra#

Hydra is the local VSC Tier-2 cluster managed by VUB-HPC. The computational resources of Hydra are distributed following an exclusive policy, meaning that each computational job running in the cluster is allocated dedicated resources.

The cluster is a general purpose heterogeneous cluster that is maintained under a policy of permanent upgrades. Therefore, over the years it has gained several features:

  • high-core nodes for generic compute

  • nodes with high-end NVIDIA data center GPUs

  • high-memory nodes with lots of CPU (RAM) memory

  • fast InfiniBand Interconnect between the nodes

Detailed hardware information is available at VSCdocHydra Hardware

Anansi#

Anansi is a small cluster designed for interactive use and test/debug jobs. It sits next to Hydra and both clusters share the same network, storage system, and software stack, which simplifies testing those jobs that will be run on Hydra.

The main characteristics of Anansi are:

  • CPU cores can be used by up to 4 jobs

  • GPU devices can be used by up to 4 jobs

  • Maximum GPU devices per job is 1 (100% GPU fraction)

  • Maximum job duration is 12 hours

In contrast to Hydra where computational resources are allocated exclusively to single jobs, the resources of Anansi can be shared between multiple jobs. This applies to CPU cores which are shared transparently, and to GPUs which can be requested in fractions of a full device. Other resources like system memory are not shared.

This approach is specially useful for light-weight (interactive) tasks such as testing/debugging that can involve frequent idle periods. Hence, even though the size of Anansi is smaller than Hydra, users should be able to quickly find an available slot to run their short jobs.

Moreover, the maximum time a job can run in Anansi is limited to 12 hours, which further increases the availability of its resources.

Detailed hardware information is available at VSCdocAnansi Hardware

VSC Tier-1#

Tier-1 clusters offer computational resources in a bigger scale to tackle bigger problems

  • large parallel computing jobs that require a high-bandwidth low-latency interconnect

  • large arrays of jobs with a multitude of small independent tasks

  • large arrays of jobs that require the use of 1 or more GPUs

As a member of VSC, all researchers in VUB and UZ Brussel can request access to any of the Tier-1 clusters in the VSC network. Resources in Tier-1 are granted to research projects that need the large scale HPC and can efficiently use its computational resources. More information in Getting Access.

The current Tier-1 cluster, VSCdocHortense, consists of both CPU-only and GPU nodes.

Full list of Tier-1 clusters is available in VSCdocTier-1 Hardware

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