Eligibility and access conditions
CÉCI computing resources are intended for academic research activities conducted by members of the partner institutions. Each university within the CÉCI consortium (ULiège, UCLouvain, ULB, UNamur, and UMons) is responsible for granting access to its members.
Researchers, professors, postdoctoral researchers, phD and master students affiliated with a CÉCI partner university may request access to the infrastructure for scientific computing projects.
To request the creation of a CÉCI account, you must:
- Be officially affiliated with a university member of the CÉCI consortium
- Hold a valid 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 necessary administrative procedures to obtain one.
Note that each account is personal and non-transferable. Users must not share their login credentials with any other person. Users are expected to comply with the CÉCI usage policies and with the local regulations of the hosting institutions. More information about this can be found here: What are the rules for using the CÉCI clusters?
Guest Access
External collaborators may obtain access to CÉCI resources. If obtaining a university email address is not practical given the duration or nature of the collaboration, a CÉCI account holder with a permanent position within a CÉCI university may sponsor a guest user for a limited period of time.
This process differs slightly from the standard account creation procedure.
Please refer to the section CÉCI account quick start for further details about the account creation.
Resources available
The European model for High-Performance Computing (HPC) categorizes computing resources into three main tiers:
- Tier-2: Resources available at universities and research institutions
- Tier-1: National or regional supercomputing centers with significant capacity
- Tier-0: Large-scale infrastructures typically funded through international partnerships
This tiered model helps structure and optimize access to supercomputing resources across Europe.
CÉCI clusters (Tier-2)
A CÉCI account provides access to the HPC clusters hosted across partner universities. These Tier-2 clusters typically include between 1000 to 5000 CPU cores, and some also provides tens of GPU accelerators. In addition to compute resources, users are granted access to a distributed storage system accessible from all CÉCI clusters.
Detailed technical information about these resources can be found on the CÉCI clusters and Common Storage pages.
Walloon Supercomputer (Tier-1)
The Walloon Region supports a regional Tier-1 supercomputing infrastructure 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.
CÉCI users are eligible to request compute time on the Walloon Region Tier-1 supercomputer. Access is granted following the evaluation of a project describing the scientific objectives and computing requirements.
Further details about the application procedure are available on the Tier-1 projects page.
LUMI supercomputer (Tier-0)
The LUMI supercomputer is one of Europe’s flagship Tier-0 HPC infrastructures operated within the EuroHPC initiative and hosted in Finland. It is a pan-European supercomputing platform designed for large-scale simulations, data analytics and artificial intelligence workloads, offering resources well beyond the scale typically available on Tier-1 and Tier-2 systems.
As Belgium is a member of the LUMI consortium, researchers affiliated with Belgian universities and public research institutions may apply for compute allocations through the Belgian national share of LUMI resources. Access is project-based and allocations are granted following scientific and technical evaluation procedures. In addition, eligible researchers may also apply through EuroHPC calls for larger European-scale projects.
More information about LUMI and how to obtain access is available on the EuroCC Belgium website. If needed, you can also contact us at ceci-logist@lists.uliege.be for guidance regarding the application procedure.