Network upgrade on scratch

Updated on 17/02/2026

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.

The scratch storage is receiving an upgrade on February 17. This will not impact any running jobs, but as a safety measure, no new jobs will start during this intervention on Hydra. For interactive work, the cluster Anansi remains fully operational. The expected completion time of the upgrade is 17:00 CET.

During the upgrade, the head nodes of the storage will be extended with an extra CPU, the amount of memory will double and they receive a Infiniband NDR card. This will allow us to directly connect the zen5_mpi and hopper_gpu to the scratch and increase the performance on those partitions.

Contact us at VUB-HPC Support if you have any comments or questions about these changes.