Infrastructure
The ISC degree programme provides different kinds of infrastructures for running computational workloads, grouped under the name ISC³ (ISC Compute Center). This section describes the machines themselves; if you just want to use them, start with Using ISC³.
Where things go on this site: this section describes what exists and how it is built (machines, network, services); what humans do with it — processes, monitoring, backup policy — lives in Operations. Acronyms are expanded in the glossary.
The HEI research compute nodes (Chacha and Disco) are part of CALC@HEI and are documented there — they are operationally and administratively distinct from ISC³, even though both are documented on this site for now.
The machines at a glance
The on-site machines follow a dance-themed naming scheme; the external web servers carry Roman general names.
| Name | Role | Hardware highlights | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| Calypso | Students sandbox cluster | 1 DELL R740XD master + 15 DELL R630 workers | hardware · network · software |
| Rumba | Proxmox VE node — teachers tooling & ISC services | Dell R7920 | hardware |
| Pagode | AI workstation pair (momentarily removed) | 2× Lenovo ThinkStation PGX, direct QSFP interconnect | hardware |
| epyc0 / epyc1 | Future Proxmox infrastructure | 2× Gigabyte R282-Z92 (dual EPYC) | rack · future work |
| Hannibal | VPS: ISC Learn Moodle platform | hosted at Infomaniak | services |
| Marcellus | VPS: legacy services | hosted at Infomaniak | services |
The physical position of every machine is on the rack layout page.
Teaching infrastructure
- Calypso : The students sandbox infrastucture hosted onsite. It can be accessed via the VPN.
- Rumba : The ISC teachers tooling machine hosted onsite — first Proxmox VE node of the fleet
- VPN : NetBird — plus the legacy WireGuard path — used to access the Calypso and Rumba infrastructures
Software configuration
- Calypso software stack : accounts, container runtimes, SLURM and registry on the students cluster
Services
- Public landing page :
calypso.hevs.chand the reverse proxy through which every public site is served - Rack status & thermal alerts : live rack status page + Telegram alerting
- Hannibal : external VPS hosting the ISC Learn Moodle platform
- Marcellus : external legacy VPS hosting various services
Backup policy and state moved to Operations → Backups.
Future work
How ISC³ — Calypso in particular — will evolve soon. These are proposals, not the current state:
- Datacenter ISC architecture : the target architecture — Proxmox VE everywhere, three zones (services / playground / management) on two physical clusters
- Thermal protection & emergency shutdown : layered heat-shedding and staged-shutdown proposal, born from the June 2026 heat event
- GitLab ISC architecture : plan for the self-hosted GitLab instance (phase 1)
- GitLab install runbook : step-by-step installation runbook for the GitLab deployment