HPC systems
Each of the HPC facilities consists of a compute resource (several compute nodes each with several processors and internal shared memory, plus an interconnect that connects the nodes), a central storage resource that is accessible by all the nodes, and a secondary storage resource for back-up (and in few cases also for archiving). All facilities use variants of the UNIX operating system (Linux, AIX, etc.).
Storage systems
The NIRD provides data storage capacity for research projects with a data-centric architecture. Hence it is also used for storage capacity for the HPC systems, for the national data archive and other services requiring a storage backend. It consists of two geographically separated storage systems. The leading storage technology combined with the powerful network backbone underneath allows the two systems to be geo‐replicated in an asynchronous fashion, thus ensuring high availability and security of the data.
The NIRD storage facility, differently from its predecessor NorStore, is strongly integrated with the HPC‐ systems, thus facilitating the computation of large datasets. Furthermore, the NIRD storage offers high-performance storage for post-processing, visualization, GPU‐computing and other services on the NIRD Service Platform.