ADA HPC
What is it?
ADA is a high performance compute (HPC) cluster for research at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Named after Ada Lovelace, it serves as the successor to the BAZIS cluster and is managed by the IT for Research team.
ADA is a heterogenious cluster composed of partitions and servers financed by various VU research departments and the VU IT department. The cluster is particularly useful for executing multi-node computations that are not possible on the general VU compute servers but do not require the scale of the National Supercomputer, Snellius.
ADA users are granted access to a set of compute partitions based on the resources owned by their research department. Users not affiliated with a research department that owns cluster hardware can get access to the community partition.
A large collection of tools, compilers and libraries is available for your analysis, and your data on SciStor is directly accessible from ADA.
ADA is also available through OpenOndemand, a user-friendly GUI that provides access to ADA.
What can it be used for?
ADA is particularly usefull for HPC workloads that require one or several compute nodes to complete within a feasible timeframe. The compute nodes in ADA are equipped with high-cpu, high-RAM and GPU functionality such that they will provide significant speedups in comparison to using a standard desktop.
Please note that GPU functionality on ADA is however limited to several NVIDIA A30 / RTX 2070 cards, if you require more GPU performance (e.g. for training LLMs) you can apply for access to the national HPC infrastructure Snellius or consider buying ADA compute nodes with GPUs for your department.
How to request access
A form to request an account on ADA can be found on 🔒 VU Service Portal under IT > My work field > Research > HPC Cluster Computing > New ADA HPC Cluster Computing.
It is recommended that new users of ADA have some experience in using the command line interface as it is crucial for knowing how to interact with the cluster.
Are there costs involved?
The ADA cluster community nodes are free to use for VU researchers, although resources are limited.
Buying dedicated compute nodes
If your research projects require heavy usage of HPC you can consider spending part of your research budget to buy compute hardware for your group. Please contact IT for Research for more information on what is possible.
Getting started
You can find information on how to use ADA on the ADA MANUAL page. Also take a look at the SURF wiki Snellius pages, which contains a lot of information that applies to ADA as well.
Once a year, the VU organizes the HPC Course. All ADA users will be notified when registration opens. Additionally, it is often also possible to attend HPC Courses through SURF at other locations, please consult the SURF Agenda for dates and registration.
Contact
Wondering if ADA fits your research needs? Please contact IT for Research