Visit SurfSARA!
About SURFsara
SURFsara is the Dutch National High Performance Computing centre. For more than 40 years, SURFsara has been providing a complete package of services in the field of High Performance Computing, Networking, Data Storage and Visualization to the academic community. SURFsara closely works together with researchers from all Dutch universities, in scientific fields ranging from quantum chemistry, astrophysics and high-energy physics, to life sciences, medicine and psychology, to sociology and marketing.
High Performance Computing
At the core of SURFsara’s services is the national supercomputer. The current supercomputer is a heterogeneous system offering a total of 1.8 Pflop/s, designed to support a wide range of applications. The current system consists of:
- 1620 thin nodes, each with 24 Haswell / Ivy Bridge cores, 64 GB RAM
- 177 thin nodes, each with 32 Broadwell cores, 64 GB RAM
- 32 fat nodes, each with 32 Sandy Bridge cores, 2.7 GHz, 256 GB RAM
- 64 GPGPU nodes each with dual NVIDIA Tesla K40m GPUs, 96 GB RAM
- 18 KNL nodes, each with 64 Knights Landing cores, 96 GB RAM
All nodes are connected with FDR 56 Gbps infiniband, and they are attached to 7.9 Pbyte of online storage.
Furthermore, SURFsara provides:
- Lisa, the national compute cluster, offering 7856 CPU cores
- an HPC Cloud, allowing researchers to buid their own high-performance compute infrastructure;
- a Hadoop cluster, offering 1370 CPU cores and 2.3 PB of storage, for “Big Data” research and machine learning
SURFsara is centrally located in the Netherlands, and is easily reachable by public transportation from Schiphol airport and from all universities.
SURFsara offers the visitors
- access to the dutch national supercomputing facilities
- collaboration with scientific hosts around the Netherlands, working in a wide variety of research fields
- technical and scientific support from our local HPC experts
- travel and living expenses
- logistical support before and during your stay
- social events to get acquinted with other visitors, as well as with Dutch local culture
Some pre-visit arrangements
Once you have been contacted, as soon as possible, before starting your visit, you are requested to send us your:
- name and surname
- your address
- date and place of birth
- a copy of your passport or identity card
- an electronic picture of yourself
- the exact visit dates
This will allow us to speed up the registering procedures. Please do not book any travel until the dates have been agreed with both SURFsara and your research host. You may also need to take into consideration any recommendations from the selection panel which are stated in your acceptance letter.
You will receive well in advance further information about the process for paying your travel and living expenses.
Most visitors bring their own laptops to use during their visits. Please let us know as soon as possible if you will not be able to bring a laptop with you, so that we can try to arrange a computer to be available for you in your office. Please also let us know whether you would prefer a Linux or windows environment, although note that we cannot guarantee to provide your preferred choice.
During your stay
During your visit, you will stay close to the university or research group that you will work with. Public transportation is quick and efficient, and any university can be reached from Schiphol airport within a few hours. SURFsara itself is located in Amsterdam and is easily reachable by public transportation as well.