- The IT department IT i forskning, formidling og utdanning FFU(NO), or Division for Research, Dissemination and Education (RDE)(EN), is responsible for delivering IT support for research at University of Oslo.
- The division's departments operate infrastructure for research, and support researchers in the use of computational resources, data storage, application portals, parallelization and optimization of code, and advanced user support.
- Announcement of this newsletter is done on the hpc-users mailing list. To join the hpc-users list, send a mail to sympa@usit.uio.no with subject "subscribe hpc-users Mr Fox" (if your name is Mr Fox). The newsletter will be issued at least twice a year.
Happy new year! As we dive into 2025, the landscape of HPC and AI continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace. In spring, NRIS will get and prepare a completely new supercomputer, Olivia, that will not only merely handle HPC workloads and AI workloads, but will be capable of seamlessly merging both workloads to break new grounds in scientific computing based research. While waiting for Olivia, please enjoy these HPC news.
Olivia is coming
In late 2024 Olivia was procured and it's currently being assembled and verified in Chippewa Falls (the birth place of Seymore Cray). The factory acceptance test is planned some time during the winter with delivery to the Lefdal Mine datacenter at springtime. Pilot users will probably get access just before the summer holiday starts and general production for users will start around the semester start. The official opening date is June 17th with an official ceremony with invited guests inside the mountain.
NRIS will provide Documentation, best practices, tutorial, training & courses (physical and online). A comprehensive best practice guide is being put together and will be published at the opening and updated as more hands on experience is gathered.
Olivia is a mixed HPC and AI system with an AMD based partition (similar to Betzy) and an AI partition using NVIDIA hardware only, GH200 modules.
Notable sizes are :
- 64512 AMD Turin cores
- Each HPC node has 3 TB local storage
- 21888 NVDIA Grace ARM cores
- 304 NVIDIA H100 accelerators
- Each of the 304 GH200 modules has 200 Gbits/s interconnect
- 5 PB local storage, solid state (1.1) and hdd (4.2)
New Sigma2 e-Infrastructure allocation period 2025.1, application deadline 24 February 2025
The Sigma2 e-Infrastructure period 2025.1 (01.04.2025 - 30.09.2025) is getting nearer, and the deadline for applications for HPC CPU hours and storage (for both regular and sensitive data), is 24 February. This also includes access to the Sigma2 part of TSD (Colossus and storage), as well as LUMI-C and LUMI-G.
Please note that although applications for allocations can span multiple allocation periods, they require verification from the applicants prior to each application deadline to be processed by the Resource Allocation Committee for a subsequent period. Hence any existing multi-period application must be verified before the deadline to be evaluated and receive an allocation before the new period starts. This does not apply to LARGE projects.
Kind reminder: If you have many CPU hours remaining in the current period, you should of course try to utilize them ASAP, but since many users will be doing the same there is likely going to be a resource squeeze and potentially long queue times. The quotas are allocated according to several criteria, of which publications registered to Cristin is an important one (in addition to historical usage). The quotas are based on even use throughout the allocation period. If you think you will be unable to spend all your allocated CPU hours, it is highly appreciated that you notify sigma@uninett.no so that the CPU hours may be released for someone else. You may get extra hours if you need more later. For those of you that have run out of hours already, or are about to run out of hours, take a look at the Sigma2 extra allocation page to see how to ask for more. No guarantees of course.
Run
projects
to list project accounts you are able to use.
Run
cost -p nn0815k
to check your allocation (replace 0815 with your project's account name).
Run
cost -p nn0815k --detail
to check your allocation and print consumption for all users of that allocation.
User contribution and costs
As was mentioned in previous newsletters, UiO users - like any other users of Sigma2 systems - will pay the actual operational costs, but we will pay up-front as a guarantee, and not per use.
It is of utmost importance that all researchers and especially those at UiO are aware of the actual operational cost connected to their work, and that you try to apply for external funding to cover your part of the operational cost. How much, and if, you will have to pay for your operational costs directly from your project depends on your faculty and how they choose to handle the invoice.
Centrally at UiO, the administration will shave a significant part of the invoice off, this will function as a “centrally covered discount” before the remainder of the invoice is sent to the faculties and museums based on their usage.
Also notice that when applying for EU projects where Sigma2 resources are involved, for planning purposes it is very important to contact Sigma2 before sending in the application.
HPC Course week/training
Norwegian Research Infrastructure Services (NRIS) has an extensive education and training program to assist existing and future users of our services. UiO has joined NRIS training providing training to all Norwegian HPC users, instead of just focusing on UiO users, this makes it possible to provide a more streamlined and consistent training by consolidating the training events. The courses are aimed to give the participants an understanding of our services as well as using the resources effectively.
The plans for this spring include an ongoing series of workshops for Best Practices and Tools for High Performance Computing, a Webinar on Heterogeneous HPC Architecture: A Fundamental Overview, A Sneak Peak into Olivia’s Best Practices guide and an HPC On-boarding 05-08 May 2025.
See the following for an updated list of all events: https://documentation.sigma2.no/training/events.html
Training video archive: https://documentation.sigma2.no/training/videos.html
Please do not hesitate to request new topics or uncovered areas of training to use the services more optimal or make your work with our systems easier.
BioNT advanced course
BioNT (Bio Network for Training) aims to provide high-quality training programs tailored to the biotechnology industry and biomedical sector. As a partner of the BioNT consortium, Scientific Computing Services at the Division for Research, Dissemination and Education (UiO) is organizing a series of short courses titled "Machine Learning with Biological Data". This series includes:
- Intermediate course (3 sessions):
- Covering Python (pandas and numpy) to handle biological data
- Exploratory data analysis (EDA) with Python - code along (live coding) 1-day session
- Machine Learning with Biological Data - part 1 (3 days):
- Covering Supervised Learning and Unsupervised Learning
- Machine Learning with Biological Data - part 2 (3 days):
- Covering advanced data processing and model validation techniques, and introduction to deep learning
These short courses will feature hands-on sessions with examples drawn from the field of genomics. Registration for these courses is available at https://biont-training.eu/training.html.
Tentative Timeline:
- Intermediate Course: April 7, 2025 (3 days)
- EDA Code Along: April 24, 2025 (1 day)
- ML with Biological Data, Part 1: May 26, 2025 (3 days)
- ML with Biological Data, Part 2: June 11, 2025 (3 days)
Fox Supercomputer - get access
The Fox cluster is the 'general use' HPC system within Educloud, open to researchers and students at UiO and their external collaborators. There are 24 regular compute nodes with 3,000 total cores and seven GPU accelerated nodes with NVIDIA RTX 3090 and NVIDIA A100 cards available. Access to Fox requires having an Educloud user, see registration instructions. About 250 projects have already joined Educloud!
For instructions and guidelines on how to use Fox, see Foxdocs - the Fox User Manual.
Software request form
If you need additional software or want us to upgrade an existing software package, we are happy to do this for you (or help you to install it yourself if you prefer that). In order for us to get all the relevant information and take care of the installation as quick as possible, we have created a software request form. After filling in the form, a ticket will be created in RT and we will get back to you with the installation progress.
To request software, go to the software request form.
Support request form
We have had great experience with users requesting software installations since we introduced the software request form. We now usually get all the information we need at first contact. We want to further improve our support and get to the root cause of an issue faster. Therefore we now encourage you to fill in a form when you need help with other types of issues as well. When the support form is submitted it will be sent to our hpc-drift queue in RT and will be handled as usual. The difference from emailing us directly is that we will now immediately get needed bits of information and your tickets will be labelled according to what system you are on and what issue you are facing.
The link to the new support form will be shown when you log in our servers and it has also been added to relevant documentation pages. You can have a look at it here:
https://nettskjema.no/a/hpc-support
We encourage users of all our HPC resources to use this form. Whether it concerns Fox, LightHPC, ML-nodes, Educloud OnDemand, Galaxy-Fox or our individual appnodes.
Other hardware needs
For the last few years, the AI landscape has been evolving at a breathtaking pace. At the time of this writing, the most recent announcements and releases are NVIDIA DIGITS, Project Stargate and DeepSeek but by the time of the publication of this newsletter, this might already be outdated. We are keeping an eye on news from science and industry and will continue working on telling viable products apart from hype and PR.
If you are in need of particular types of hardware (fancy accelerators, GPUs, ARM, Kunluns, Graphcore, NVIDIA DIGITS etc.) not provided through our local infrastructure, please contact us (hpc-drift@usit.uio.no), and we'll try to help you as best we can.
Also, if you have a computational challenge where your laptop is too small but a full-blown HPC solution is a bit of an overkill, it might be worth checking out NREC. This service can provide you with your own dedicated server, with a range of operating systems to choose from.
With the ongoing turmoil about computing architectures we are also looking into RISC-V. The European Processor Initiative is aiming for ARM and RISC-V and UiO needs to stay on top of things.
With the advent of integrated accelerators (formerly known as GPUs) with shared cache-coherent among all execution units including accelerators (like AMD MI300 and NVIDIA Grace/Hopper) these might be of interest for early adopters. Call out if this sounds interesting.
Publication tracker
The Division for Research, Dissemination and Education (RDE) is interested in keeping track of publications where computation on RDE services are involved. We greatly appreciate an email to:
hpc-publications@usit.uio.no
about any publications (including in the general media). If you would like to cite use of our services, please follow this information.
Fox giving keynote @ SuperComputing24
