Projects
The HPC Group participate in several projects both nationally and internationally. The main focus is related to building competence in development and administration of HPC services and technologies.
As a member of the Norwegian HPC-program (NOTUR), UiT is established as one of four operational resource-sites in the national Metacenter. As a regional resource site we have special responsibilities in advancing science in research areas related to the polar areas and the arctic.
The main technology focus is related to the administration of large Open Source clusters. Since 2003 the HPC-Group at the University of Tromsø has been one of five international groups working on the cluster management toolkit Rocks. In 2004 Rocks won several awards in HPC Wire, including the prize for "Most Important Software Innovation 2004". Since then Rocks has also become the de-facto standard for cluster-management in Norwegian High Performance Computing.
By co-operating with San Diego Supercomputing Centre (SDSC) on the development of the Rocks Cluster Distribution, we are part of a leading international environment in this area. We are also a member of the Gelato Federation, where advancing Linux on Itanium is an important issue.
NOTUR
NOTUR is the Norwegian national program for high performance computing. The program is a continuation of the NOTUR-program which ended in 2004. As of January 1st 2005, NOTUR II was established as a limited company, Uninett Sigma, run by Uninett. The Program is focused on the acquisition, administration and maintenance of national equipment for scientific computing. One of the main issues is the development and renewing of the infrastructure connected to high performance computing. In addition the Program also co-ordinates the national efforts in GRID-computing and represents Norway in such efforts internationally.
NOTUR: http://www.notur.no/
Uninett: http://www.uninett.no/
ROCKS
The Rocks development community includes the Cluster Development Group at San Diego Supercomputer Center, Scalable Systems in Singapore, the HPC Group at University of Tromsø in Norway, the SCE Group at Kasetsart University in Thailand, and the cluster development group at KISTI in Korea.
Development of Rocks is funded from NSF, and aided by generous equipment donations from Sun Microsystems, Dell, AMD, Infinicon Systems, and Intel. The Rocks project was started at SDSC in early 2000, with the goal of "making clusters easy".
Today, the Rocks user base includes five Top500 computers, and several hundred clusters around the globe. The Rocks Register, a web page where Rocks users voluntarily register their deployed cluster, shows that Rocks powers an aggregate of nearly 70 TFlops of peak computing.
Project homepage: http://www.rocksclusters.org/
