We are happy to announce that the new official Amsterdam UMC HPC Resource is live as of the first of Juli 2025!
Over a year ago the departments of IT, Research Support, Human Genetics and Radiology & Nuclear Medicine, have started discussing a new shared High-Performance Computing (HPC) resource for to all Amsterdam UMC employees. Our aim was to provide a secure platform for processing sensitive data, offer cost-effective computing resources, facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing and to promote the FAIR data principles.
Now finally, after many, many meetings, discussions and hard work from many people, we have opened the doors to the HPC cluster which we have named Gaia.
Introducing Gaia, Helios and Selene
Gaia is the Greek goddess of the earth. We use Gaia to refer to the collection of HPC resources we currently have in store:
- Helios, Greek god, personification of the sun, is the login node for research applications.
- Selene, Greek goddess, personification of the moon, is the login node for care & diagnostic applications.
Both Helios and Selene can be accessed through SSH, but also through a graphical web interface based on OpenOndemand. From here you can submit compute jobs which will be processed by the many worker nodes of the cluster, designed to handle large CPU and GPU centric workloads.
User support is organized by a team of subject matter experts, the current team which supports HPC Genomics joined by the team behind Luna (Radiology cluster). After your account is migrated you will be added to a new Teams page. Through this Teams page and soon also through ServiceNow we will offer our support. System administration is organized by the Advanced Compute & Data Core (ACDC), together with the IT department.
In the meantime please visit our wiki page for more information: Home – HPC user wiki
Migration
We will soon start the migration of the existing users of Ares & Athena. We have divided the migration in 3 phases over the course of Juli & August. When it’s your turn to migrate, we will let you know by e-mail. During the migration we ask of you to transfer the data you have in your home & scratch folder to Gaia. Please note that storage space is limited, so we implore you to only migrate data you are actively using while making sure to archive the rest. Also, we ask of you to test your applications on Gaia and check if everything still works according to your expectations for a seamless transition. More details will follow when it’s your turn to migrate. Our aim is to finish the migration by September, after which the HPC Genomics cluster will be dismantled and made part of Gaia.
Kick-off
At the start of the new academic year, we will organise a kick-off for Gaia and further promote and open our doors to new users. It will be an occasion to show what we have to offer, what you have been able to achieve and how we can facilitate future opportunities.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask!
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