- 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.
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The year of 2026 is only a month and a half old, but already feels like it has had enough action for a year. While the Western world got a bit saturated with geopolitical news, some of us went to Osaka for SuperComputing Asia/HPC Asia 2026 to get inspiration and news around HPC, AI, quantum computers and so on. We learned about everything from Ultra Ethernet and Variational Quantum Eigensolvers to Japan's plans for the next Fugaku (moving from home-brewed ARM system to fully NVIDIA based). While these topics are interesting enough they are still quite far away; for more local HPC news, please read ahead.
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Next Colossus
All hardware is now on-site. The last GPU nodes were delivered early January and we are now configuring the cluster. We aim for setting it in production in early March. Oh, and we also have a new logo.
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Fox
During the recent Fox downtime we made several changes to our physical infrastructure to allow us to expand and improve the cluster for the future. Unfortunately we had a number of unexpected issues, including multiple Infiniband switches failing. This caused the downtime to last longer than we expected, but we were able to recover and Fox is now bright eyed, bushy tailed and ready for the future.?
Changes include:
- Upgraded the cluster network from 1Gbps to 10Gbps
- Note: the new network does not allow full Internet access from nodes, but http(s) is still available through a proxy server and should "just work" for most users. See the documentation for details (link below).
- Upgraded several backend servers/services
- Slurm upgraded to 25.05
- Open OnDemand now has a faster and more robust connection to the cluster
- Moved servers around to improve airflow
- Improved power distribution
- Cleaned up racks
With this important hurdle passed we have laid the foundations we need to grow Fox even more both in terms of hardware expansions and functionality. We're excited to reveal more over the coming months!
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Local HPC documentation
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Local HPC documentation is now available at https://docs.hpc.uio.no/ (or https://documentation.hpc.uio.no). It covers Colossus, Fox, machine learning and light HPC machines. Appnode users might consider the Easybuild documentation relevant.
NRIS users will recognize the setup and structure. We strongly encourage users to check out the NRIS documentation for more details, since non-cluster specific information and guides may apply to our local clusters.?
Other hardware needs
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. We do not have RISC-V available today, but if we see a demand for testing and gaining experience we will consider procuring some samples. Call out if this sounds interesting.
New Sigma2 e-Infrastructure allocation period 2026.1, application deadline 23 February 2026
The Sigma2 e-Infrastructure period 2026.1 (01.04.2026 - 30.09.2026) is getting nearer, and?the deadline for applications for HPC CPU hours and?storage (for both regular and sensitive data),?is 23 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@sikt.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.
KI-fabrikken started
KI-fabrikken is a national initiative that brings together advanced supercomputing infrastructure and responsible AI development to support research, innovation, and public-sector use of artificial intelligence in Norway. The initiative builds on existing national and European investments, including the European LUMI supercomputer and Norway’s newest GPU-accelerated supercomputer, Olivia.
As Norway works towards the development and use of trustworthy AI, it is important to build on the expertise, infrastructure, and long-term investments within academia. KI-fabrikken is closely linked to the European LUMI AI Factory and aims to reduce barriers to AI adoption by addressing challenges related to data access, skills, and technical expertise across research, industry, and the public sector.
The University of Oslo (UiO) is an active partner in KI-fabrikken, contributing particularly to training, skills development, and ecosystem building in close collaboration with national partners. The initiative is coordinated by Sigma2 and funded by the Research Council of Norway and the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. Through this work, KI-fabrikken seeks to enable broader and more responsible use of AI technologies across disciplines and sectors.
Galaxy on FOX upgrade (v.25.1)
Galaxy on Fox has been upgraded to version 25.1. The Galaxy platform gives web access to the FOX cluster both for running jobs and storing files on FOX's partitions : user home and project directories. A large number of tools (~ 7000) is available and these tools are constantly updated and enhanced.
A brand new feature in the last upgrade is the possibility for every user to define their own storage location in most of the world storage providers - AWS, DropBox, Google Disks, etc. - and access the data stored there directly from the Galaxy interface, upload it into the platform and execute jobs.
Upcoming Workshops and Trainings?
A series of workshops from the Carpentry community node at the University of Oslo has been planned for this semester. Please see the overview below:
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With the increasing importance of e-infrastructure in various fields of research, public administration and industry, NRIS (Norwegian research infrastructure services) has a central role in providing training opportunities for Norwegian user groups.?
All courses are open to all participants and free of charge, but registration is mandatory. Below is a list of upcoming events provided by the NRIS Training Team:
NRIS: How to parallelize independent tasks on HPC
Sometimes you need to run many similar calculations. Instead of running them one after the other and managing many job scripts or writing elaborate shell scripts, we will learn how to run them potentially at the same time using a workflow manager without writing many job scripts.
We will demonstrate and practice this using Snakemake. If your calculation is a for-loop in Python or R and it takes too long to run, this session is for you.
Date and time:
- Start: Mar 04 2026 09:00
- End: Mar 04 2026 12:00
Target audience:?
- The course is aimed at students, researchers and employees who want to upskill their knowledge of the usage of HPC and storage facilities.
NRIS: HPC Onboarding course
Are you a new user of the national HPC-systems? If yes, we highly recommend this 3 half days onboarding hands-on course, organised by NRIS.
Date and time:
- Start: Apr 14 2026 09:00
- End: Apr 16 2026 12:30
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Through KI-fabrikken’s connection to the European LUMI AI Factory, our users also have access to a set of European-level training activities covering AI, machine learning, and high-performance computing:?
https://lumi-ai-factory.eu/trainings/?
These activities are particularly relevant for users working with large-scale AI workloads, GPUs, and advanced HPC systems.
The Fox cluster is the 'general use' HPC system within Educloud, open to researchers and students at UiO and their external collaborators. Access to Fox requires having an?Educloud user, see registration?instructions.
For instructions and guidelines on how to use Fox, see?our HPC documentation.?
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.?
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.
Kitsune
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