Posted in 2023
Hydra upgrade 27-28 November finished
- 28/11/2023
Hydra has gained a major system upgrade, a brand new scratch storage, extra compute nodes, and a new GPU cluster for interactive workflows.

VSC User Survey
- 08/11/2023
The Flemish Supercomputing Centre (VSC) is carrying out a short user survey. Please take some time to participate in it and give your feedback about our services: https://uhasselt.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_e8rTPE6iYFAZ0Bo
Big upgrade for Hydra the 27-28 November 2023
- 27/10/2023
We are happy to announce a big upgrade to our beloved tier-2 HPC cluster in VUB. On Monday, November 27th 2023 at 03:00 (CET), Hydra will be shut down for 48 hours to apply a major system upgrade, renew the scratch storage and add some extra compute nodes.

Belgian LUMI user day
- 23/10/2023
Join us in Brussels on November 6th, 2023, starting at 10:00 (CEST), for the Belgian LUMI user day.
Job scheduler outage in Hydra
- 11/10/2023
On Tuesday, October 10th at around 17:30 (CEST), there was an outage of the Slurm scheduler in Hydra. Please check the output of your jobs carefully if it was in queue or running between October 10th at 17:00 CEST and October 11th at 09:00 CEST.
31/10/2023: HPC Intro Training Session
- 19/09/2023
We are pleased to announce our next on-site HPC training session, in cooperation with the Vlaams Supercomputer Centrum (VSC).
30/10/2023: Linux Training Session
- 18/09/2023
We are pleased to announce our next on-site Linux training session, in cooperation with the Vlaams Supercomputer Centrum (VSC).
24/10/2023: VSC Users Day 2023
- 04/09/2023
We are pleased to announce the VSC Users Day 2023. The theme of the day: how to optimize your workflows for maximum HPC performance. This day is all about you: inspiring talks, lightning talks, and the unique opportunity to meet your fellow VSC HPC users.
License server upgrade
- 21/08/2023
On Wednesday 23 August 2023 at 09:00 the license server for licensed software in Hydra will be down for upgrades. The operation is expected to take ~30 minutes. Affected software: MATLAB, Gurobi, Mathematica, Q-Chem, QuantumATK.
Reboot of Hydra login nodes
- 26/07/2023
The login nodes of VUB’s Tier-2 cluster Hydra will be rebooted today (July 26th, 2023) at 22:00 CEST.
Network outage at VUB main campus
- 14/07/2023
16:30 The network outage in VUB main campus is resolved. Access to both the Hydra HPC cluster and the Pixiu object storage has been reestablished.
Scheduled maintenance of HPC notebook platform
- 29/06/2023
The notebook platform at notebooks.hpc.vub.be will be offline for maintenance on July 4th at 10:00 (CEST). This operation will last 30 minutes and all connections to existing lab sessions will be interrupted.
Tier-1 Data launch event
- 03/05/2023
On 9 May 12:00-13:30, the VSC is officially opening the Tier-1 Data component infrastructure. Register to participate in the online event: https://www.vscentrum.be/post/tier-1-data-launch-event
New web portal for notebooks on the HPC
- 29/03/2023
All PhD students and staff of VUB can now access our High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure from a web browser. This new interface allows managing and running computational notebooks directly on our Tier-2 cluster (Hydra).

Legacy software change
- 27/03/2023
On 27 March 2023, we’ve made a change in Hydra impacting only very old software modules.
Extra Ampere GPUs in Hydra
- 17/03/2023
We are happy to announce the immediate availability of 2 more GPU nodes in
Hydra adding 4 new Nvidia A100 GPUs to the cluster. These new nodes are
joining the ampere_gpu
partition and share the same CPU, memory and GPU
configuration with the other nodes in this partition.
Documentation website refresh
- 03/03/2023
We completed an update of the machinery running this documentation website that brings a refreshed look-and-feel and some quality-of-life improvements.
New notebook platform pilot
- 06/02/2023
We are very pleased to announce the beginning of the second pilot phase of the Notebook platform of VUB-HPC.
New command prompt in Hydra
- 23/01/2023
We have updated the default command prompt in Hydra with a more informative and better looking one.

LUMI user course
- 13/01/2023
On February 14-17 2023, the LUMI HPE Centre of Excellence (HPE CoE), AMD and the LUMI User Support Team organize a general LUMI course.