Posted in 2024
New Anansi cluster for notebooks and test/debug jobs
- 27/06/2024
We are happy to announce the immediate availability of a new cluster designed for interactive use (i.e. notebooks) and short jobs for testing and debugging purposes. The name of this new cluster is Anansi.
Visual Studio Code now available
- 26/06/2024
We are happy to announce that Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is now available through our notebook platform. This version of VS Code runs directly on the hardware of the HPC cluster and can be used from your browser.
Hydra OS upgrade
- 25/06/2024
On Wednesday, June 26, at 06:00, we will upgrade the login nodes to Rocky Linux 8.10. During this upgrade, Hydra will be unavailable for approximately 30 minutes, but running jobs will not be impacted. At 08:00, we will also upgrade the Hydra gateway. During this time, internet access in Hydra will be unavailable; however, the login nodes will remain accessible and running jobs will not be impacted unless they require internet access.
Removal of broadwell nodes from Hydra
- 12/06/2024
The broadwell partition will be removed from Hydra on Sunday 16 of June at midnight. Only jobs that can finish before that date will be able to run on the broadwell partition.
Notebook platform environments on 2023a
- 05/06/2024
We are happy to announce the immediate release of updated Jupyter environments on our notebook platform with the 2023a software toolchains.
Hydra Overview 2023
- 31/05/2024
Year 2023 of the SDC team was marked by the award of the new Flemish Tier-1 supercomputer, which will be managed by us and hosted by VUB in the Green Energy Park. Our commitment with the rest of our services stays unchanged and now it is time to look at the state of the Hydra cluster, VUB’s Tier-2 HPC infrastructure. 2023 was an eventful year for Hydra and we have collected some statistics on the usage of the cluster by our users.
Hydra system upgrade with brand new nodes
- 23/04/2024
We are very pleased to announce the ready availability of 20 new nodes in Hydra with last-generation CPUs and a larger memory and cache per core than usual. Alongside the addition of these new nodes, we are also upgrading the operating system of rest of the cluster, which will require a planned reboot of the login nodes on Friday 26/4 at 06:00 (CEST) rendering the cluster inaccessible for a maximum of 15 minutes. Queued and running jobs will not be disrupted.
Planned internet interruptions on 6 April 2024
- 21/03/2024
As announced on WeAreVUB Staff, on Saturday April 6th, the VUB network team will perform network updates on the VUB campus, which will impact any internet connection between VUB and the outside world.
Softening environment of Julia modules
- 18/03/2024
We improved how we handle installations of Julia and Julia packages in Hydra. From now on, software modules in the cluster providing a base installation of Julia or any Julia package will not lock the working environment in any way upon load. This translates to the following features:
Your OneDrive in VUB can now be used from Globus
- 09/02/2024
We are happy to announce that it is now possible to connect your OneDrive storage (including SharePoint) in your VUB account to the Globus network. This provides a convenient method to move your data between OneDrive and the storage on all VSC clusters, as well as to any other computer you are currently using in Globus.
Hydra scratch flash storage upgrade part 2 on 10 January 2024
- 09/01/2024
On 10 January 2024 between 9:00-15:00, we will finalize the flash storage extension of Hydra’s scratch filesystem. During the upgrade, we will stop the scheduler to avoid putting load on the storage, and the performance of the scratch will be decreased. Running jobs will continue to run, and jobs in queue will remain queued.