Hydra moves to VUB Etterbeek campus

Hydra will very soon move from ULB Solbosch campus to the recently upgraded VUB data center on the Etterbeek campus. This change will bring improved power supply, cooling and security measures to our HPC cluster. The move is scheduled in the week of April 11-15.

During this period, it will not be possible to connect to Hydra in any way by our users. Your jobs will not start if they cannot end before April 11th at 00:00 (CEST). If all goes according to plan, we hope to have Hydra back online by Friday, April 15th. We are currently taking backups of all data in Hydra prior to the move. These special backups will guarantee that there is no data loss even if some hardware would be physically damaged in the process.

Moreover, the storage system for VSC_HOME and VSC_DATA will be renewed at the same time that Hydra moves to Etterbeek campus. Data will be fully transferred to the new storage before Hydra is installed in its new emplacement. We expect this operation to complete by Wednesday, April 13th, which will allow our users to use the other VSC clusters from that date. We will publish more details about this new storage system in the near future.

Finally, the 12 Nvidia Kepler GPUs in Hydra will be decommissioned before the move. Those GPUs are quite old and their usage has become very low in recent months. Therefore, the kepler_gpu partition won’t be available once the move is over.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact VUB-HPC Support.