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Academic Supercomputing in The NetherlandsStatisticsPopulation: 16.4 million GDP/capita: 25,200 PolicyNCF - an independent foundation under the umbrella of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) - is in charge of the national policy on academic supercomputing and coordinates and promotes the use of advanced computing facilities. One of NCF's key policy activities is to provide the academic community with access to top-of-the-line supercomputer resources. To achieve this goal NWO has since 1990 fully financed the acquisition and subsequent upgrades and replacements of the national academic supercomputer for scientific research. For the same purpose NCF also co-finances the innovation of the national academic research network to ensure high-speed connectivity between Dutch universities. Long term funding for the installation, running costs and future upgrades or replacements of the national supercomputer facilities is provided by NWO. Larger non-academic research institutes and industry can have access to the national facilities, but this is incidentally used. NCF supports grid development and deployment in the Netherlands through investments in grid infrastructure. NL-grid is a project that started in 2002 with the cooperation of NCF, SARA, NIKHEF, ASTRON and ASCI, and created a national infrastructure for grid applications. In the period 2004-2006 NCF invested € 2.8 million in the grid infrastructure. In 2006 NWO granted € 28.8 million to the BIG GRID project. The objective of this 4-year project, a cooperation of NCF, NBIC and NIKHEF, is to realize a science-wide national grid infrastructure. in March 2007 a contract for the acquisition of a new national supercomputer was signed. The new system, named Huygens, was installed in two phases, the first phase was installed in June 2007 and the final phase consisting of a IBM p575 using Power 6 technology was installed in June 2008. The Netherlands, through NCF, is a member of the PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) initiative as well as of the PRACE Project. The PRACE initiative consists of 5 principal partners (France, Germany, Spain, The Netherlands and UK) and 9 general partners. The principal partners have expressed their interest in funding and hosting a Tier-0 facility in their own countries. The PRACE project is a two-year project funded by the EC that started in January 2008 and aims at creating all necessary conditions (legal and technical) for the installation of a pan-European HPC network of Tier-0 supercomputers to be used by all European researchers. At present, 14 countries are involved in the PRACE project. The national policy on networking for the research community has been established by the SURF foundation - the higher education and research partnership organisation for network services and information and communications technology - whose members are the universities, schools for higher professional education, research institutes and national organisations for research and education. Network innovation is funded by the government on a project/programme basis. The GigaPort Next Generation (NG) Network project received in November 2003 € 40 million funding from the Dutch government. The new national academic network was developed through this project. Supercomputing facilities for the academiaThe National Supercomputer - Huygens - is a IBM p575 p6/3328 installed at SARA. Many of the other systems in the list below are also accessible through NCF for use by the scientific community.
National academic networkSURFnet6 - the national academic network, developed during the GigaPort project - links the networks of more than 180 organisations. It is a hybrid network (IP and optical). Most universities and research institutes connect to the backbone at 20 Gbps and many of them use also dedicated lightpaths. There are two connections to GÉANT2, one at 30 Gbps and another at 12.5 Gbps. The NetherLight optical infrastructure is operational since January 2002. The Radio Astronomy institute ASTRON/JIVE has a dedicated DWDM connection (32x2.5 Gbps) into NetherLight. The international connectivity consists of the following lambdas: 2×10 Gbps to StarLight (Chicago, USA), 2×10 Gbps to CERN, 1×10 Gbps to CzechLight in Prague, 1×2.5 Gbps to NorthernLight in Stockholm, 1×10 Gbps to UKlight in London and 2×10 Gbps to New York. The network is operated by SURFnet BV - a private not-for-profit company owned by SURF. The activities of SURFnet are restricted to higher education institutes, research institutions including industrial research, scientific libraries and academic hospitals. The 2007 budget is € 33.4 million. Users finance 50%. Allocation of resourcesScientists from the academia who want to use any of the national facilities may submit a proposal to NCF. Proposals are discussed in the WGS - NCF's Advisory Committee for scientific usage of supercomputers - and are subject to peer-review. On approval, applicants receive a grant in terms of resource units. National GridsBiG GriD is the Dutch national grid. The project, involving NCF, NIKHEF and NBIC, started end 2006 and its main goal was to implement a national grid infrastructure for e-Science. At present BiG GriD has a computing capacity of 40 000 SpecInt2006 rate (1600 cores) and a storage capacity of the order of 1100 TB. These resources are installed at SARA and NIKEF in Amsterdam, and at Philips Research in Eindhoven. Besides hardware support, BiG Grid has also a team of experts in charge of middleware development and user support. A tender process for acquisition of new computing clusters and extra storage was initiated in March 2008. List of abbreviations
Contacts and AddressesDr. P.J.C.
Aerts
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