Oct. 1st 2017 marks the beginning of a new era in the Norwegian collaboration for scientific computing and research data. Two new systems will be opened for general availability for the Norwegian research communities, FRAM and NIRD. The services are free of charge and available for all academic researchers in Norway and for research projects financed by the Norwegian Research Council.
FRAM
Fram is the name of the new large scale computing facility and is located in the basement of the Technology building at the UiT campus.
Users familiar with using the existing compute resources in Norway will find it very easy to migrate to the new system as the user environment is more or less the same as on the existing systems.
NIRD, Norwegian Infrastructure for Research Data
NIRD is the nomenclature for the infrastructure and service platform for research data. The NIRD storage is located at UiT and NTNU and the data is mirrored between the sites to ensure uptime and availability.
Technical specifications
Fram size and numbers
The Fram system is a Linux cluster with approximately 1000 compute nodes each with 32 CPUcores and 64 gigabyte of memory. In addition Fram has 8 nodes with 512 gigabyte memory and 2 nodes with 6 terabyte memory each to serve special needs for high and very high memory configurations.
Fram is ranked as the 153rd most powerful computer in the world on the June 2017 Top500 list
- Theoretical compute capacity, 1.08 petaflop/second Rmax (or guaranteed not to achieve performance)
- Measured compute capacity, 0.95 petaflop/second Rpeak (a measure of how fast the system can do matrix multiplications)
NIRD size and numbers
NIRD has appr. 6.5 PB storage available and is directly connected to the 100 gigabit/second academic network in Norway. NIRD provides both storage (active and archive) and a service platform for establishing specialized services for the scientific communities.
More information
The national services are organized through a subsidiary of UNINETT named UNINETT Sigma2. More information about the services and how to get access to them can be found at www.sigma2.no.
Roy Dragseth
Section leader
Digital research services at UiT
