It couldn’t come at a better time : in a couple of weeks the Computing Centre will install a new High Performance Compute cluster. Hydra will replace Aster, the current Alpha cluster, and offer to the ULB and VUB research communities a 20-fold computing power increase.
With its perfectly balanced architecture, Hydra is best-of-breed for a very broad range of applications. Compute intensive jobs, large memory programs, parallel packages and I/O intensive codes alike will run smoothly and swiftly. Based on the latest AMD Opteron® dual core CPU, with plenty of SMP RAM, a blistering Infiniband® interconnect and a Lustre® file system, the new Hewlett-Packard XC4000 Linux cluster is suited for all areas of computational science. As can be expected, a large portfolio of development tools will be available as well as a selective list of scientific applications.
The new system counts 30 compute nodes, each with 4 CPU’s (totalling 480 FPU’s), 32 GB of RAM (960 GB on aggregate) and access to 6 TB of disk space. More details can be found at
http://www.vub.ac.be/BFUCC/hydra/