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#

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

Full list of Tier-2 clusters is available in VSCdocTier-2 Hardware

Hydra#

Hydra is the local VSC Tier-2 cluster managed by VUB-HPC. It is a general purpose heterogeneous cluster that is maintained under a policy of permanent upgrades. Therefore, over the years it has gained several features:

  • 3000+ CPU cores for generic compute

  • 20+ NVIDIA data center GPUs

  • High-memory node with 1.5 TB of RAM

  • Fast InfiniBand Interconnect (EDR)

Detailed hardware information is available in VSCdocHydra 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