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Dive into VSC history with em. prof. dr. Roose

Finding means to fight climate change is a major target of today's scientific research. To this aim, it is essential to limit greenhouse gas emissions, for instance by replacing fossil fuels with alternatives such as biogas or hydrogen, or by combining power and heat generation. Maintaining complete and stable combustion in such unconventional conditions is not straightforward. In this user story, Alessio Pappa explains how his research can help design better combustors for sustainable energy production.

LUMI is one of the pan-European pre-exascale supercomputers. It is also the fastest supercomputer in Europe (the Top500 list published in May 2023) and the third fastest globally. 

Would you like compute time on LUMI? You can apply now (deadline: 1 December at 23.59 h CET). 

You can find the application form and detailed instructions at https://www.enccb.be/GettingAccess

Vrije Universiteit Brussel is set to host Flanders' next Tier-1 supercomputer with a 12M euro investment. It will start in autumn 2025, driving innovation for climate, AI, and more. Plus, it'll be in Belgium's greenest data center at VUB's Green Energy Park.

The HPC teaching kit is a set of documents that can be used as support in computer science courses and distributed to bachelor and master students to introduce HPC. Here is the English version.

Dirk Roose is an emeritus professor at KU Leuven, Department of Computer Science. He chaired the KU Leuven HPC Steering Committee, played an important role in the start of the Flemish Computer Center (VSC), and chaired the user committee of the VSC. We sat down with em. prof. dr. Roose for an elaborate talk. In this first part of the interview series, he sheds light on the challenges in the early days of HPC, the current challenges and why he is so fascinated by this domain. Dive with us into memory lane together with Prof. Roose!

Prof. Dirk Valkenborg is the Programme director of the data science trajectory in the Master of Statistics & Data Science at UHasselt. He teaches a course on Machine Learning in this programme, and during this course, his students use the supercomputing infrastructure of The Flemish Computer Center. We sat down with Prof. Valkenborg to ask him why he is so keen on getting his students enthusiastic about working with a supercomputer.

Upscaling your resources from Tier-2 to Tier-1 or Tier-0 can be a huge advantage and accelerator for your research 🚀🚀! Tim Lebailly, PhD student at PSI, aims to improve current machine algorithms for AI. He went from Tier-2 to Tier-0 infrastructure for his research. According to Tim, moving up from Tier-2 to Hortense (Tier-1) was very straightforward: “It’s very similar hardware. Only the scheduler is different, but that’s a detail.”  Tim also had to conduct numerous experiments in parallel. If he attempted this while using Tier-1, he used the entire GPU partition exclusively, causing some jobs to remain in the queue for a long time. The next logical step for Tim was to apply for compute time on LUMI, the fastest Tier-0 supercomputer in Europe. Tim: “Thanks to the scale of LUMI, I only utilise a small fraction of the supercomputer's capacity, enabling me to schedule all my jobs simultaneously. In that regard, the user experience is really nice.” Want to know more? Read all about Tim's upscaling journey by clicking the title above or via www.enccb.be/usupscalingtimlebailly.

MPI heavyweight Dr Rolf Rabenseifner has recently retired. However, we could catch the former Head of Parallel Computing, Training and Application Services at the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), University of Stuttgart, for an extensive talk.