NB: The information provided on this page is intended for SDU employees. If you are not employed at SDU, please contact your local Front Office for more information on how to access the national HPC resources.

Researchers at SDU can apply for computational resources on all the national HPC infrastructures:

Type1 – DeiC Interactive HPC

The type 1 system is mainly focused on interactive computing and easy access for users. The system is made of the YouGene cluster hosted at SDU (see cluster specs here) and the OpenStack cluster at AAU. SDU researchers can access the cluster resources via their UCloud account.

Type 2 – DeiC Throughput HPC

This type of HPC system typically has a large number of cores which can be a mix between cost-effective and calculation-efficient units. Type 2 also has the ability to handle large amounts of data and its main focus is on high-throughput performance.

There are three type 2 HPC systems available at national level for SDU researchers:

The hardware accessible to SDU users for a type 2 HPC project is shown in the table below.

Compurerome 2.0GenomeDKSophia
Xeon Gold 6230 Cascade Lake, 40 cores, 192 GB AMD EPYC Rome 7452, 64 cores, 512 GBAMD EPYC 7351, 32 cores, 128 GB

Type 3 – DeiC Large Memory HPC 

This type of HPC system focuses on problem solving, with a structure that cannot be easily or efficiently distributed between many computer nodes. This is a type of system that is characterized by typically relatively few cores with access to a large globally addressable memory area. 

Type 3 is hosted and maintained at SDU. For the cluster specs check here. The user guide can be found at this link.

LUMI Capability HPC

LUMI is an abbreviation for “Large Unified Modern Infrastructure”. LUMI is one of the three European pre-exascale supercomputers part of the EuroHPC project and located in CSC’s data center in Kajaani, Finland.

Denmark participates in the consortium behind the LUMI supercomputer. Part of the LUMI machine therefore belongs exclusively to Denmark and is, in this sense, considered a national HPC resource.

For more information on LUMI, check the official documentation here.

How to apply

The national HPC resources are available to SDU researchers via two separate channels:

  • SDU researchers can apply for national resources via national calls announced twice a year by the Danish e-infrastructure Consortium (DeiC). Application forms and more information can be found on the DeiC website.
  • SDU researchers can also apply for the fraction of national resources reserved only for SDU. These resources must be applied for via the SDU eScience Center.

If you wish to apply for the national resources reserved only for SDU, notice that there are two different types of projects that you can apply for. The two types of projects have separate application forms and procedures:    

Regular projects

If you are applying for less than 50.000 CPU-hours, 1000 GPU-hours and/or 20TB of data, your application is considered a regular project. Applications for regular projects can be submitted at any time via the eScience Center’s service desk or, for DeiC Interactive HPC resources, via UCloud. Regular projects are evaluated on a continuous basis, and evaluation should be expected within 2 weeks. 

New regular projects (not extensions) which require less than 1.000 CPU-hours, 100 GPU-hours, 1TB of data will be approved after checking that PI satisfies the requirements for submitting applications.  

The application form for a regular project can be found below. Notice that the application form is not needed for UCloud (see how to apply via UCloud here).

Large projects

If you are applying for more than 50.000 CPU-hours, 1000 GPU-hours and/or 20TB of data, your application is considered a large project. Applications for large projects can only be submitted twice a year when an internal SDU call for national resources is announced.

The internal SDU calls for national resources are announced in alignment with the DeiC national calls. This is because a requirement for submitting an application for a large project is that the same application has been submitted to the national DeiC call

If a researcher has received a national grant for the same application sent to SDU, the SDU application will be withdrawn automatically in order to ensure more local resources to researchers who did not receive a national grant. 

For large projects, SDU researchers must send both:

  • A filled out application form for a large projects, where they specify the amount of resources asked for. Note that the amount of resources asked for will be different from the national call and that only one form is needed even if the applicant is asking for compute time on more than one system.
  • The applications (one or more) they used for the DeiC national call. Note that for every machine type selected in the application to SDU, there should be a corresponding DeiC application for the same machine type.

Applications for large projects must be submitted via the eScience Center’s service desk. 

Internal SDU calls for national resources will be announced on the eScience Center’s website. 

Access procedure for the HPC systems at SDU

SDU applications are evaluated by the eScience Center Operational Board. The board evaluates applications based on the guidelines described in the internal document “Access procedure for the HPC systems at SDU” (last update: May 2023).