BAZIS HPC

What is it?

BAZIS is a High Performance Compute (HPC) Cluster for research hosted at VU Amsterdam and maintained by IT for Research. It consists of over a hundred compute nodes, some with GPUs. A number of these nodes are community resources that can be used by all VU researchers for free. Jobs are submitted to a queueing system, so you will have to wait for others to be finished first.

Some research group have purchased their own compute nodes available exclusively for their own research.

A large collection of tools, compilers and libraries is available for your analysis and your data on SciStor is directly accessible from BAZIS.

What can it be used for?

Most researchers start out by running their analysis tools on their laptop. The performance of a laptop is limited however. You might find your analysis takes up so many resources that your laptop becomes unusable for other tasks, or tasks take so long that you have to find a way to keep your laptop running overnight. For example a lot of AI tasks, such as running Large Language Models (LLMs), require a dedicated GPU, which most laptops don’t have. These tasks will run very slowly, or not at all.

A next step might be purchasing a Workstation with more performance and maybe a GPU. You can run the same applications as your laptop and leave it running overnight and during weekends. The modern VU offices are not geared for workstations, however, so that might not be possible.

The point where your laptop or even a workstation becomes unusable for your analysis workflow is when you should consider HPC. HPC nodes have a large amount of RAM, many processor cores and often multiple GPUs. HPC clusters work with a queueing system, meaning the system will wait until enough resources are available to run your job and it will run multiple jobs simultaneously so its resources are used optimally.

Be aware that it is generally not possible to run graphical desktop applications (such as R studio, SPSS or ArcGIS) on an HPC cluster. Your analysis needs to be able to run as a script that can be started from a Linux command line. This means there is a learning curve to use HPC, especially if you are not used to a Command-line Interface (CLI) and scripting.

CLI and scripting skills are very useful to have for every researcher, but if you feel you do not have the time to learn these skills there might be other options available such as the VU Compute Hub or SURF Research Cloud where you can run some graphical tools.

At the moment the community partition does not include GPU resources. If you have tasks that need a GPU (such as Machine Learning) you can apply for access to the national HPC infrastructure Snellius or consider buying BAZIS compute nodes.

How to request access

A form to request an account on BAZIS can be found on 🔒 VU Service Portal under IT > My work field > Research > HPC Cluster Computing > New BAZIS HPC Cluster Computing.

Are there costs involved?

The BAZIS 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

There is a guide with BAZIS tips & tricks in the Handbook.

Also take a look at the SURF wiki Snellius pages, they contain a lot of information that applies to Bazis as well.

SURF organises regular “Introduction to Supercomputing” training sessions, these are free to attend for VU researchers. The course is aimed at using Snellius, but what you learn is applicable to BAZIS as well. Please consult the SURF Agenda for dates and registration.

Contact

Wondering if BAZIS fits your research needs? Please contact IT for Research