Cenaero has been operating scientific computing infrastructures for more than 10 years — supercomputers and the facilities that host them. These infrastructures provide the computing resources needed to support simulation technologies developed by researchers as part of research projects or consulting services for companies in various sectors, particularly in the aeronautics industry. These resources are made available to research stakeholders in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation — universities and research centers — as well as to companies, in accordance with the agreements established with the Walloon Region, which supports the project.
Our latest supercomputer was named "Lucia" in memory of Lucia De Brouckère, a chemist and professor at the Faculty of Sciences of the Université Libre de Bruxelles.
The supercomputer is funded by the Walloon Region and hosted within the A6K ecosystem in Charleroi. It is based on HPE Apollo systems supplied by Axians, a subsidiary of VINCI Energies.
Lucia consists of a CPU partition with 300 compute nodes, a GPU partition with 50 compute nodes, and a smaller heterogeneous partition for specific workloads such as AI, visualization, or high-memory requirements — all interconnected via an InfiniBand HDR network. The combined peak performance of Lucia (CPU + GPU partitions) is approximately 4 PetaFLOPS, and it was ranked 245th on the Top500 list of November 2022 with its GPU partition. You can find all details about Lucia here.
The computing infrastructure is connected at high speed (10 Gbps) to the Belgian research network Belnet, and through it to the European research network GÉANT and the Internet.nternet.
Project categories
The supercomputer’s resources are allocated, in accordance with the agreement established with the Walloon Region, to projects classified into two categories.
CAT 1: Non-economic activity with free access
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CAT 1a: University units and university college units as defined by the decree
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CAT 1b: Approved research centers as defined by the decree, within the framework of a non-economic activity
CAT 2: Economic activity with access at market price
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CAT 2a: University units and university college units as defined by the decree
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CAT 2b: Approved research centers as defined by the decree, within the framework of an economic activity
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CAT 2c: Companies carrying out economic activities
How to access Lucia
There are two ways to access Lucia:
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Through the universities of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation (clickable link);
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Through a direct request for access to the resources from Cenaero (clickable link).
Economic activity:
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Contract research on behalf of a company
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Contractual technological monitoring
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Testing, expertise, trials, etc.
Non-economic activity:
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Independent research in which the approved research center, university unit, or university college unit determines the project details, owns the results, and bears the potential risk of failure
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Effective collaborative research meeting specific criteria