High Performance Computing
High Performance Computing has been established as the so-called third methodology (next to theory and experiment). As the national High Performance Computing center, we support scientists with state-of-the-art integrated services, facilities and infrastructure, while providing expertise and support.
Capability Computing vs. Capacity Computing
Capability computing is typically thought of as using the maximum computing power to solve a large problem in the shortest amount of time. Often a capability system is able to solve a problem of a size or complexity that no other computer can. Capacity computing in contrast is typically thought of as using efficient cost-effective computing power to solve somewhat large problems or many small problems or to prepare for a run on a capability system.
Available HPC facilities
- Huygens, the Dutch National Supercomputer (IBM p575 Power6 system, 65 TFlop/s) is a general-purpose capability system with large memory SMPs, a fast interconnect and both a fast and large I/O subsystem.
- Lisa, the National Compute Cluster (Dell Xeon InfiniBand cluster, 20 TFlop/s) is a capacity system which also allows for running modestly parallel jobs. However, when you have demanding I/O requirements we advise to use Huygens instead.
- GPU, a GPU cluster (HP NVIDIA Tesla cluster, 15 TFlop/s) is a special purpose system. For some problems this can be the most cost efficient solution, however, this normally requires a significant programming effort.
- HPC Cloud Computing brings fast compute clusters within the reach of scientists for whom other HPC facilities are not an option.
Available Services
Apart from the regular user support, we also offer optimization, parallelization and scaling support.
National Partners
Our national partners are: