About Hypatia

HYPATIA is the Cloud infrastructure that has been developed to support the computational needs of the ELIXIR-GR community, but also the broader community of life scientists in Greece and abroad. It currently hosts important ELIXIR-GR services and resources (e.g., the national COVID19 Data Portal of Greece), while it undertakes computational tasks in the context of various projects of ELIXIR-GR members.

The infrastructure is named after Hypatia (Υπατία), a Greek philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt (born circa 350-370AD; died in 415AD).

Under the hood, HYPATIA consists of a powerful computational cluster of heterogeneous physical machines. Currently, the HYPATIA’s cluster is comprised of:
  • 32 basic nodes: (2 CPUs, 14 cores/CPU, 512GB DDR4 RAM).
  • 2 hefty nodes: (2 CPUs, 24 cores/CPU, 1TB DDR4 RAM)
  • 3 GPU nodes: (2 CPUs, 14 cores/CPU, 768GB DDR4 RAM, 2 GPUs)
  • 8 I/O nodes: (2 CPUs, 14 cores/CPU, 512GB DDR4 RAM, 2x2TB SSD 6G)
  • 9 infrastructure nodes:(2 CPUs, 14 cores/CPU, 192GB DDR4 RAM)
 
HYPATIA has been funded by the “ELIXIR-GR: Managing and Analysing Life Sciences Data (MIS: 5002780)” project (co-funded by Greece and the European Union - European Regional Development Fund) and it is currently hosted by a GRNET’s data center, located in Athens, Greece.
 

How can I use the HYPATIA?

HYPATIA’s computational resources are allocated for predetermined time periods to particular user-created projects. HYPATIA’s users are able to submit project requests through a dedicated Web interface, which is based on CLIMA, an open source platform for the allocation of resources on Clouds. Project requests are examined by a dedicated committee that decides about their acceptance, modification, or rejection.
 
 
Authentication in HYPATIA is done leveraging ELIXIR-AAI technologies. This means that anyone with an active ELIXIR-AAI account is able to connect. The following user types are currently provided by HYPATIA:
  • Bronze user: The default type of user, having the less privileges and most limitations. This type is given for testing or educational purposes during training events.
  • Silver user: Suitable type of user for regular lab members (upgrade upon request).
  • Gold user: Suitable type of user for ELIXIR-GR’s Principal Investigators (upgrade upon request).


Currently, users are able to make requests for the following types of projects:
  • “24/7 services” projects: Offer VMs to host 24/7 services with relatively lightweight demands (e.g., Web servers, API endpoints, databases).
  • “On-demand batch computations” projects: Offer resources to be allocated for batches of computational tasks (in the context of containerised CWL-described workflows).
  • “On-demand computation machines” projects: Offer VMs to undertake short-term, computational-intensive experiments.
  • “Storage volumes” projects: Offer storage volumes that can be attached to VMs that belong to “24/7 services” or “On-demand computation machines” projects. Plans to provide cold-storage in the future.
 

How can I sign-in to the resource management system?

  • To sign-in to the resource management system an ELIXIR-AAI account is required (just click on the “Register” button here) and wait for an approval email).
  • When your your ELIXIR-AAI account is ready, you can just sign-in using your credentials (click “Login” here).
  • During the previous steps you have to give your consent that ELIXIR-AAI and HYPATIA’s resource management system will have access to basic account information required for the flawless operation of the system.
Learn more about the ELIXIR-AAI.