Licence and access policies

Note

This page is about software for academic use, thus the information here may not hold for users from research institutes and commercial companies!

Access to Software and Scientific Applications on NRIS installations is almost allways regulated by license and access agreements based on either usage (scale/time/academic or commercial), the user’s affiliation to the machine-hosting institution or the users´s affiliation to an academic institution (or, of course, all subsets of the above). In general, license access restrictions typically fall within one of the following categories:

  1. Academic license - generally available to all academic users based in Norway. There may be application specific limitations and/or definitions, please allways check the license agreement(s) when starting using new software.

  2. Open-source license - users are allowed to freely use and distribute the library or tool with some restrictions. Some examples include the GNU Public License and the MIT License. A good overview of open source licenses can be found at the Open Source Initiative.

  3. Commercial license - may be granted to an individual, a project, a scientific group, a center or parts of/whole organization. See the list below for available licenses at NRIS.

  4. Free Proprietary Software - users are allowed to use the software if they have signed an agreement with the developer community/vendors. Example of such codes are the chemistry code ORCA and the physics code CASTEP. In these cases, if to install the users themselves have to provide access to installation files and tools, and new user groups needs to documente a valid agreement with the software providing entity to get access. Alternatively, an NRIS representative may make this agreement on behalf of the community - but the need for documenting access agreements is valid for this situation also.

Note that it is allways the user’s responsibility to make sure they adhere to the license agreements. For some cases, NRIS has been delegated responsibility for limiting access to given codes unless users can prove their right to access these - for instance by documenting access to the license elsewhere. The necessary proof of access in these cases will inevitably vary, please check each case individually.

NRIS funding policy

Currently NRIS fund no scientific software, but for a number of cases users fund commercial software that runs on NRIS administered machines. A special case is the chemistry/material science code Gaussian, funded by the partner universities of NRIS (UiB, UiO, NTNU and UiT) as a joint agreement between them and Gaussian.inc - with Sigma2 the facilitator. Also, all of the BOTT partners holds MatLab licenses that are available on NRIS machines.

Note

NRIS do still fund licenses for code development tools (compilers, debuggers, profiling tools) (software that belongs to the field tagged “Code Development”).

All other software that demand license fees are thus funded by user communities themselves. However, there are a number of licenses that was purchased before the decision of not funding scientific software anymore which holds lifetime access. These are listed below.

Commercial software where NRIS users still have general access:

  • Amber - the license is for release 11 of the code and is valid for the lifetime of the software. Currently this is not installed on any of our clusters. Please let us know if you need this.

  • Crystal - the license is for release 14 of the code and is valid for the lifetime of the software. Currently this is not installed on any of our clusters. Please let us know if you need this.

  • Gaussian - the license is paid for by the NRIS partner universities, thus users from UiB, UiO, NTNU and UiT automatically should get access to the code. Others who wants access would have to prove license access.

  • NBO6/7 - the license is valid for the lifetime of the software, thus there will be no change until the release of major-version 8.

  • Turbomole - the license is valid for the lifetime of the software. We are allowed to use version 7.3 for 5 more years. Please let us know if you need this.

For more details, see the underlying list.

Commercial and Proprietary licenses at NRIS

Software

Machines

Available for whom

License type

Field

Source of funding

Abaqus

Betzy, Fram

Members of license holding groups

Group

Multiphysics/FEA

Users

AMS (ADF/BAND)

Saga

Members of license holding groups

Group

Chemistry/Material science

Users

Allinea MAP

Betzy, Fram, Saga

All users

National HPC

Code development

National/Sigma2

Allinea Performance Reports

Betzy, Fram, Saga

All users

National HPC

Code development

National/Sigma2

ANSYS

Fram

Members of license holding groups

Department/Group

Multi-physics

Users

ANSYS CFX

Fram

Members of license holding groups

Department/Group

CFD

Users

ANSYS Fluent

Betzy, Fram

Members of license holding groups

Department/Group

CFD

Users

Gaussian

Fram, Saga

UiB, UiO, NTNU, UiT users automatic

Site for UiB, UiO, NTNU, UiT

Chemistry/Material science

Users

GaussView

Fram, Saga

UiT users automatic

Site for UiT

Chemistry/Material science

Users

Intel Parallel Studio XE

Betzy, Fram, Saga

All users

National HPC

Code development

National/Sigma2

MATLAB

Betzy, Fram, Saga

Members of institutions with site license

Site/Department

Mathematics/Data analysis

Users

NBO6/7

Fram, Saga

All academic users

National academic HPC

Chemistry/Material science

National/Sigma2

STAR-CCM+

Betzy, Fram

Members of license holding groups

Group

Multi-physics/CFD

Users

TotalView

Betzy, Fram, Saga

All users

National HPC

Code development

National/Sigma2

Turbomole

Fram

All users on given machine

Computer Center

Chemistry/Material science

National/Sigma2

VASP

Fram, Saga

Members of license holding groups

Group

Chemistry/Material science

Users

Table explanation:

  • License access limited on group level. Only members of the specific software group has access to the software.

  • License access limited on institutional level. Either for all users from an institution (site) or for a limited subgroup of users from this institution (faculty/department/research-center/research-project).

  • License access limited on computing center level. This means that all users have access to software on all machines administrated by this computing center.

    • A subset of this type is license access limited on machine level.

  • License access limited on national agreement level. We currently have a couple of software packages with a multilateral agreement between the participants in the BOTT (Bergen-Oslo-Trondheim-Tromsø) collaboration and some software vendors. All users from all these four institutions will have access. We also have a couple of national agreements, which implies that all national users or all users with a certain access domestically will be allowed access.

Users are responsible for having the correct credentials and agreements in terms of license access. For all software with access limitations on group- and research-project level the credentials may have to be provided to NRIS before being granted access to software installed on NRIS controlled machines.

IPv4 and IPv6 addresses of Sigma2 HPC clusters

For a software to be able to communicate with its license server, they must be able to receive request(s) from one or more ip ranges below, depending on which machine you want to use a license.

Cluster name

IPv4 addresses

IPv6 addresses

SAGA

158.36.42.32/28

2001:700:4a01:10::/64

158.36.42.48/28

2001:700:4a01:21::/64

FRAM

158.39.114.64/27

2001:700:4a00:10::/64

158.36.141.144/28

2001:700:4a01:25::/64

BETZY

158.36.154.0/28

2001:700:4a01:23::/64

158.36.154.16/28

2001:700:4a01:24::/64