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 and recurring terms 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Carnaval | Students playground cluster (Proxmox, GPUs) | 11× DELL R630, one NVIDIA A2 or Tesla T4 each | hardware · network · software |
| Rumba | Proxmox VE node — teachers tooling & ISC services | Dell R7920 | hardware |
| Tango | AI workstation pair (one node 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 | ISC Learn · server |
| Marcellus | VPS: legacy services | hosted at Infomaniak | services |
The physical position of every machine is on the rack layout page.
Teaching infrastructure
- Carnaval : The students sandbox infrastructure hosted onsite — lab VMs, Kubernetes, SLURM and GPU work on Proxmox. It can be accessed via the VPN.
- Rumba : The ISC teachers tooling machine hosted onsite — first Proxmox VE node of the fleet.
- VPN : NetBird, used to access the ISC³ machines (Carnaval, Rumba).
Software configuration
- Carnaval software stack : golden images, lab VMs and the account model on the students cluster
Services
ISC³ provides several services, some of which are hosted on the Rumba Proxmox VE node, some on external VPSes. Have a look at the services overview page for a list of all services, their purpose and how to access them: ISC³ services.
Future work
The large-scale projects ahead — the target architecture and the proposals that fit inside it — are listed in Future work. These are proposals, not the current state; smaller open items live in the todo list.