NOTUR - THE NORWEGIAN METACENTER FOR COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE

The Notur project fulfills a pronounced and sustainable vision for a Norwegian infrastructure for High Performance Computing (HPC) and computational science. The vision of the project is to provide a modern, national HPC infrastructure in an international and competitive setting, and stimulate computational science as the third scientific path. The project serves the Norwegian computational science community by providing the infrastructure to individuals or groups involved in

• education and research at Norwegian universities and colleges
• operational forecasting and research at the Meteorological Institute (met.no)
• research and engineering at research institutes and industry who contribute to the funding of Notur.

Notur has the following partial goals:

• Establish a powerful and cost-effective infrastructure for computational science
• Enable efficient utilization of this infrastructure
• Contribute to the development of a national grid
• Be proactive in international collaboration in infrastructure and computational science
• Disseminate computational science as an important discipline in Norway

The Notur (II) project includes and further develops elements from the previous Notur project (2000-2004) and earlier HPC projects.

The core activity of the Notur project is formed by the Metacenter. The Metacenter coordinates the operation of the HPC facilities that are located at the university partners. User support at various levels, ranging from help desk operations to advanced support and technology transfer, training, and marketing contribute to the vision of Notur.

Project organization

The Notur project is funded by the Research Council of Norway (RCN) and the university partners NTNU, UiB, UiO. and UiT. The RCN entered into a 10-year agreement with UNINETT Sigma AS. UNINETT Sigma is the coordinator and project responsible of the Notur project and entered into agreements with partners

• NTNU - Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim
• UiB - University of Bergen
• UiO - University of Oslo
• UiT - University of Tromsø
• met.no - Meteorological Institute

Since January 2006, Notur is a project under the eVITA programme from the Research Council of Norway.