Welcome to the High-Performance Computing (HPC) Facility wiki

The High-performance Computing (HPC) facility is setup to provide high-performance computing power to all life science researchers at Utrecht Science Park. Coordinated by the Utrecht/Bioinformatics Center and subsidized by Utrecht University and University Medical Center, it currently provides computational power to over twenty different research groups located within Utrecht University, UMC Utrecht, Hubrecht Institute and Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology.

(for a high-resolution version of the HPC flyer, click on the thumbnail on the left)

General information

The HPC facility consists of 1544 cores and 600TB of High-Performance storage. The HPC facility runs on CentOS Linux and provides a batch-wise queueing system with a few head nodes and many compute nodes for submitting and running many computational tasks in parallel.

Dedicated administrators maintain and develop the HPC infrastructure and provide support to end users. These positions are funded by UMC Utrecht and Utrecht University (ITS).

Participating groups. Currently, twenty-nine research groups are actively using the HPC cluster.

HPC user council. To steer future directions of the HPC infrastructure together with the participating research groups, a HPC user council has been setup. We aim to meet four times a year to discuss the usage of the HPC cluster as well as new developments.

How to get involved. Research groups can participate by funding the hardware required for their own computational needs. HPC storage capacity can be rented on a per Terabyte, per year basis. For testing purposes and/or trying out the HPC infrastructure, free trial accounts can also be arranged that have (limited) access to the HPC resources, contact us if you are interested.

Conditions and Support

The conditions that apply when using the HPC infrastructure and the level of support that we are able to provide can be found at ConditionsAndSupport.

Price list

1 CPU share (€ 1200) : ~50.000 CPU hrs
1 GPU share (€ 1200): ~5.000 GPU hrs (includes 6 CPUs)
1 TB non-redundant high-performance storage (€ 180/TB/year)
1 TB non-redundant low-performance/archive storage (€45/TB/year)

Contact details

The HPC team is responsible for setting up and maintaining the HPC infrastructure, as well as for helping out with HPC related user questions. For details and contact information, go here.

First-time users

To get you started, some initial information is provided here (password required):

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How to's

A useful collection of How to's is provided here (password required):

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Software installation

The HPC infrastructure provides the basis to install any software that is needed by users. More details are provided here (password required).

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HPC infrastructure

A general overview about the HPC cluster is provided here (password required):

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• HPC_user_counsil_20200303.pptx: HPC_user_counsil_20200303.pptx