NIRD @LMD

National Infrastructure for Research Data @Lefdal Mine Datacenter

NIRD is the National e-Infrastructure for Research Data. It is owned by Sigma2 and operated by NRIS.

Note

The NIRD infrastructure offers storage services, archiving services, and processing capacity for computing on the stored data. It offers services and capacities to any scientific discipline that requires access to advanced, large scale, or high-end resources for storing, processing, publishing research data or searching digital databases and collections.

The next generation NIRD storage system is installed in Lefdal Mine Datacenter. The new NIRD is redesigned for the evolving needs of Norwegian researchers and has been procured through the NIRD2020 project.

Note

IMPORTANT: The new NIRD will open for users from 22.Feb.2023. Data has been migrated, but still, we need to do a final sync between the old and the new system before giving access to the new one. During this operation you will not have write access to the respective project neither on the old nor on the new NIRD. Here you can see when each project will have the final sync and switch over the new system.

Please check the list and be informed on when you will no longer have access to the old NIRD. NIRD Project leaders are informed via email about the same.

We kindly remind the users who have access to more than one project, to limit their activity on the new NIRD to the project(s) which were migrated, and access has been confirmed by the preparation for operation working group (POWG) team.

Mount points for NIRD on the HPC systems and DNS entries will be updated as soon as all projects are migrated. Access to your $HOME folder will be available during migration on both old and new NIRD. You as users are now responsible for migrating the data to your $HOME folders by yourself when access will be given to you in the new NIRD.

Pilot users who got access earlier are requested to follow the same workflow as earlier until your project gets the regular access. ie, put your new/altered files under the /nird/projects/NSXXXK/_PILOT to avoid data corruption.

NIRD will provide storage resources with yearly capacity upgrades, data security through backup services and adaptable application services, multiple storage protocol support, migration to third-party cloud providers and much more. Alongside the national high-performance computing resources, NIRD forms the backbone of the national e-infrastructure for research and education in Norway, connecting data and computing resources for efficient provisioning of services.

The NIRD @LMD architecture is based on IBM Elastic Storage System (ESS3200 & ESS5000 SC models) and consists of two separate storage systems, namely Tiered Storage (NIRD TS) and Data Lake (NIRD DL).

NIRD TS has two tiers, namely, performance and capacity tiers, while NIRD DL provides a unified access, i.e., file and object storage on the data lake.

The total capacity of the system is 33 PB (22 PB on NIRD TS and 11 PB on NIRD DL).

The solution is based on IBM Spectrum Scale – an IBM Systems storage product based on GPFS (General Parallel File System). The solution provides a single storage architecture which is partitioned dynamically to provide for storage allocation for POSIX based file-services and S3 based object storage.