Posted in 2026
System update rollout on VUB-HPC clusters
- 22/05/2026
We are updating the operating system and Slurm scheduler on Hydra, Anansi and sofia with the latest security and bug fixes. The rollout will start on Friday May 22nd at 14:00 CEST and will be gradually carried out on all VUB-HPC clusters in the following days. This operation has a minimal impact on our users: compute capacity will be slightly lower during the update, but there will be no downtime of the clusters and all job queues will remain operational.
19 May 2026: Online information session for Tier-1 project applications
- 12/05/2026
We are organizing an online information session for VUB users interested in submitting a Tier-1 project application. It takes place online on 19 May at 14:00. Everyone is welcome to join the session via Microsoft Teams using the following link: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/342738294056735?p=zJOKmdywWZdBwyIZwM
Scheduled maintenance of VSC account page
- 05/05/2026
On Monday May 11, scheduled maintenance will be carried out on the VSC account infrastructure starting at 07:00 CEST. The expected duration of the maintenance is approximately 1–2 hours.
VSC Link briefly down on 6 May
- 30/04/2026
Due to a scheduled migration of the VSC link, connectivity between VUB-HPC and other VSC hubs will be temporarily suspended on 6 May between 9:00 and 10:00. This should not take longer than a few minutes. Jobs running on your home institution clusters are unaffected. Jobs running on remote VSC clusters will also continue to run, unless they require access to $VSC_DATA or $VSC_HOME.
Hydra and Sofia security shutdown
- 29/04/2026
10:30 CEST: Access to VSC web services and updates to hpc.vub.be are fully restored. These services have been unavailable for the past two days as the authentication infrastructure behind them required downtime to fully recover from this security vulnerability.
VUB-HPC briefly offline on 4 May
- 28/04/2026
Due to a scheduled network maintenance, the VUB-HPC clusters will be temporarily inaccessible on 4 May between 9:00 and 10:00. This should not take longer than a few minutes. Users will be unable to access the clusters during the migration. Running jobs will continue to run, provided they do not require external internet access.
VSC Accountpage problems
- 17/04/2026
10:30 The accountpage issue has been fixed. All users should be able to access our services normally again.
LiteLLM python package compromised
- 27/03/2026
On March 24, 2026, the popular LiteLLM python package was compromised by a supply chain attack. If you are using LiteLLM in any form, please take immediate action and check if any of the compromised versions (v1.82.7 or v1.82.8) are installed. See the LiteLLM blog post on the incident for all the details on how to check if you are affected and what to do if that’s the case: https://docs.litellm.ai/blog/security-update-march-2026.
Improved way to launch interactive jobs
- 24/03/2026
We’ve changed the recommended way to launch an interactive job on a compute
node from the terminal interface. Previously, this was done using srun --pty
bash -l. We now recommend using salloc, which makes it possible to launch
parallel MPI jobs with srun or mpirun from within the interactive
session. All related documentation has been updated accordingly, see the
section on Interactive jobs for details.
VSC Web Authentication Outage
- 18/03/2026
10:00 The authentication to VSC web services has been restored. All users from VUB and UZB can access our services normally.
Update of the HPC portal
- 27/02/2026
We have updated the VUB OnDemand portal by installing several new apps, upgrading to Open OnDemand 4.1 and making a slight change to the job submission forms.
VUB HPC Overview 2025
- 23/02/2026
2025 marked a year of strong growth and strategic preparation for the SDC team. While significant effort was invested in preparing for the next VSC Tier-1 Sofia , the Tier-2 infrastructure (Hydra and Anansi) continued to expand in usage, users, and services.
VUB-HPC briefly offline on 23 February
- 18/02/2026
Due to a scheduled firewall migration, the VUB-HPC clusters will be temporarily inaccessible on 23 February. This should not take longer than a few minutes. Users will be unable to access the clusters during the migration. Running jobs will continue to run, provided they do not require external internet access.
Network upgrade on scratch
- 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.
18,20/3/2026: Linux and HPC Introduction Trainings
- 10/02/2026
We are pleased to announce on-site Linux and HPC introductions on the VUB Health campus in Jette, in cooperation with the Vlaams Supercomputer Centrum (VSC).
New GPU nodes added to Hydra
- 05/02/2026
We’re happy to announce the public availability of hopper_gpu, a brand new GPU partition in Hydra. This partition features 5 nodes, each equipped with 2 NVIDIA H200 GPUs (140 GB VRAM) and 48 CPU cores.
User limits on Anansi
- 04/02/2026
We have added new limits to the number of CPU cores and GPU resources a single user can request across all jobs on the interactive/debug cluster Anansi. The aim is to improve queueing times and to avoid situations where a single user submits many jobs and uses up the resources of Anansi, effectively blocking other users from starting their session on OnDemand or batch jobs.
Upgrade to Rocky Linux 9.7
- 27/01/2026
We are upgrading the OS and Slurm scheduler on Hydra and Anansi starting Tuesday, January 27. The rollout will start Tuesday night. User impact is minimal: there will be no downtime, and your running or queued jobs will remain unaffected.