Eligibility and access conditions

Each university of the CÉCI consortium (ULiège, UCLouvain, ULB, UNamur and UMons) is responsible for accrediting its own members for access to the CÉCI clusters.

In practice, to request the creation of a CÉCI account, you must:

  • Be officially affiliated with a university member of the CÉCI consortium
  • Hold an official university email address
  • Be endorsed by a supervisor holding a permanent academic or scientific position

If you do not yet have an official university email address, you must first complete the appropriate administrative procedures to obtain one.

Please refer to the section CÉCI account quick start for further details.

You should also read the usage rules carefully: What are the rules for using the CÉCI clusters?

Guest Access

For external collaborators, if obtaining an official university email address is too cumbersome with respect to the duration and/or nature of the collaboration, a CÉCI account holder who has a permanent position within their university may invite a guest user for a limited period of time. This procedure slightly differs from the regular account creation process.

Ressources available

The European model for High-Performance Computing (HPC) categorizes computing resources into three main tiers:

  • Tier-2 for the resources available at research institutions or universities
  • Tier-1 for national or regional centers with significant capacity
  • Tier-0 for large-scale infrastructures acquired usually in partnership among several countries

This tiering system helps organize and optimize access to supercomputing resources across Europe.

CÉCI clusters (Tier-2)

The CÉCI account gives you by default access to all the HPC facilities hosted at the partner universities. These are categorized as Tier-2 clusters counting each among 1000 to 5000 CPU cores and some of them with tens of GPU accelerators. Together with the compute time available on these systems you get a dedicated storage space on a distributed storage facility available from all CÉCI HPC clusters.

You can find all the specific technical details about these ressources on the CÉCI clusters and the Common Storage pages.

Walloon Supercomputer (Tier-1)

The Walloon Region is committed to invest on a regional Tier-1 cluster which is hosted by Cenaero. Computing time on this infrastructure is available for academic researchers from the Wallonia-Brussels Federation (universities and research centers) and the private sector.

As a CÉCI user you are eligible to request compute time on the Walloon Region Tier-1 supercomputer. This takes place by submitting a project detailing your computing needs which must be evaluated. Details about the procedure are on the Tier-1 projects page.

LUMI supercomputer (Tier-0)

similar mention for LUMI ?