Gardar - a joint Nordic computing facility in Iceland

The following information is old and will not be updated. It consists of the presentation of Gardar from the DeiC web site at the time.

Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Iceland have joined forces to establish a supercomputing facility in Iceland.

The computer, called Gardar (nhpc.hi.is), is a cluster of 288 nodes, each with 2 Intel Xeon CPU (2.53GHz) with 6 cores, which gives 3,456 cores and a theoretical capacity of 35 Teraflops. There are 24 Gbytes of RAM pr. node. The computer was inaugurated on 16. April 2012.

The operating system is Linux/ROCKS. So far the computer is used very traditionally through an SSH login on a login node. Here users may submit batch jobs via the TORQUE queuing system. 

NHPC is an experiment, meant to find advantages and disadvantages of having joint system responsiblility with several other parties, and to test in practise how it will be for the user to work on a computer 35ms away. One of the advantages of Iceland in this project is that they have a surplus production of CO2-neutral electricity which is therefore almost free of charge. 

Interested users are encouraged to sign up

Use of Gardar is open to all interested users, according to the following guidelines: 

• The applicant should belong to a Danish university.
• Time will generally be granted in increments of 1 day and 1 week on the entire computer.
• The applicant briefly describes his or her resource needs, the academic area, and the technical requirements.
• Resources are allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.

When there is a need for prioritization between applications it will be done in cooperation with the universities, taking into account the assurance of best use of the Danish part of Gardar and the spread to the widest groups and universities.

Applications in free format should be mailed to Martin Bech (martin.bech@deic.dk)

We seek to provide response and allocation within a few days. 

It is the intention that the barrier to get time allocated on Gardar is as low as possible, making it possible to use the computer for testing purposes, scaling tests, smaller projects and validation before applications for other HPC resources.

Support

Contact the support in Denmark nhpc-support@deic.dk