University of Leuven

K.U. Leuven connects researchers to supercomputing resources running in their own cloud onsite.

About the Organization

The University of Leuven, or K.U. Leuven, is a charter member of the League of European Research Universities and is ranked among the top ten European universities in terms of its scholarly output. Its rich historical tradition continues to serve as a solid foundation for top-level research and centres of academic excellence. For this reason K.U. Leuven was selected together with other university associations to collaborate and combine resources to create the Flemish Supercomputer Centre (VSC). The VSC was established by the Flemish government to satisfy the need for a competitive grid and High Performance Computing infrastructure that would be comparable with that of other European countries.

The Challenge

K.U. Leuven's HPC Linux Cluster had to offer a better, faster means of connecting up to 500 researchers and staff to supercomputing resources running in their own private cloud onsite. Fundamental were real-time off and on-campus access, a fast and rich end user experience along with session resiliency to allow for users to come back to their desktop session if needed.

Unlike many other HPC facilities which provide command access only, this facility has to give users a fully interactive graphical environment - specifically Linux KDE or Gnome desktops. Users need access to graphic-intensive computational applications running on individual virtual Linux desktops, where reliable performance is a critical factor to productivity as they achieve breakthroughs in the study of climatology, molecular imaging, computational systems biology, nanoscale physics, chemistry and more.

The Solution

After careful research and testing, K.U. Leuven determined that NoMachine software was the best solution for their needs. NoMachine Enterprise Server running on Linux is used as the central session broker to handle desktop session requests to NoMachine Linux Terminal Server Nodes giving researchers across multiple disciplines access to server-based applications that are critical to their day-to-day activities, such as R language, and Matlab.

Results

With NoMachine, the university can connect researchers to the high-performance computing cluster, with up to 100 users connecting at the same time. NoMachine's speed and unique compression capabilities allow it to provide a truly usable, scalable and rich desktop experience no matter where a user is located.

Whether on site or at a remote location, the software's dependability and session resiliency also make it perfect for researchers who need to access the Linux cloud whilst away at seminars.

Additionally, the scalability of NoMachine software means that nodes can be added to the environment “on demand” as user need increases permitting the university's ICT department to match desktop demand efficiently.