Course Resources as a Service (CRaaS)
Many courses taught at Norwegian universities require easy access to compute resources for the researcher and the students to be able to conduct teaching.
Examples may be courses where students learn about high-performance computing, computational physics, artificial intelligence, modelling or data processing and interpretation.
Course Resources as a Service (CRaaS) is a service for researchers and lecturers who need to use e-infrastructure resources in a course or workshop for research purposes.
Course Resources as a Service (CRaaS) helps researchers who want to provide courses or workshops with national e-infrastructure resources as a necessary tool. With CRaaS, you get requested CPU hours and storage resources on our supercomputers available easily and flexibly.
If you are interested in using NIRD Toolkit for a course, please make sure that you can use any of the available packages before applying.
Researchers or lecturers at universities or university colleges who need computing resources to conduct course activities.
The CRaaS service is free of charge.
To get access to the CRaaS service you must apply for resources and fulfil the following conditions:
- Hold a permanent position or be a postdoctoral fellow at your institution.
- Provide a description of your activity, including software and resource needs.
- Acknowledge the use of the national e-infrastructure resources in relevant dissemination.
What is required to get started?
Follow the steps below to get started
1. Verify your software
To ensure that your software can be used on our infrastructure, you need to contact the software team at support@nris.no to verify your software.
Please provide information about what software and versions you intend to run in the course/workshop, and that you intend to use the CRaaS service.
2. Submit the course details
Once you have received a confirmation from NRIS that your software stack can be used, you must provide details about your course in a separate application form.
This form must be submitted at least 15 days before your activity starts.
3. Receive confirmation from Sigma2
When you have submitted your application form with details, we review this and confirm if we can offer the requested resources for your course/workshop.
We can only guarantee that we can provide the resources if you get a confirmation from us.
5. Provide user details
The type, size and length of your activity determine what details we need you to provide us with.
We normally require information such as name, username, e-mail address and mobile phone number in order to grant access to resources.
You may be asked to fill out a spreadsheet if we need more information about your activity than you have already provided at this point.
Each user in your course/workshop needs to submit a user application to your allocated project via metacenter.no. Follow the instructions on how to apply for a user account.
5. Report results
After your course is conducted, we provide a form or a document where you are required to report the results from using our services.
About the national e-infrastructure services
Sigma2 works closely with the universities of Bergen, Oslo, Tromsø and NTNU to operate the national e-infrastructure services. The collaboration is called NRIS (Norwegian research infrastructure services). It is the NRIS staff who ensures that all researchers who use the national e-infrastructure services get quick and easy access to domain-specific support and related activities.
Together we work to fulfil our vision We enhance excellent research for a better world.
