Supercomputers Vilje and Stallo are decommissioned after long and faithful service for many years.
Stallo
Stallo, its name borrowed from a mythical figure in Sami folklore, was installed in Tromsø in 2012 and upgraded in 2013. Stallo was intended for MPI applications with distributed memory for running very parallel applications. Stallo has since run 173 projects with national allocation. The three projects with the highest usage of CPU hours on Stallo sum up to almost 280 million and have been conducted in the research fields of molecular properties and energetics, catalysis and spectroscopy, and aviation fuel.
Vilje
The name Vilje was taken from Norse mythology. Where the mythological Vilje equipped the first humans with sense and movement, the most important strength of the supercomputer Vilje was fast communication between the nodes. At the time of installation in Trondheim in 2012, Vilje went into 44th place on the Top500 list, a global ranking of supercomputers. This is the best Norwegian listing ever. Vilje has since contributed to numerous research projects with national allocation, 176 to be specific, and thus a vast number of scientific publications.
The three projects run on Vilje with the highest usage of CPU hours summing up to more than 430 million and have been conducted within the research fields of solar atmospheric modelling, large-scale molecular dynamics, and climate studies. In the later years, Meteorologisk institutt used about 1/3 of Vilje’s power to calculate weather forecasts.
Contributed to reopening the Estonia case
Vilje was involved when the Estonia case was resumed in 2020. 852 passengers lost their lives when MS Estonia sank in the Baltic Sea in 1994. Initially, the locks on the bow door failing from the strain of the rough waves appeared to be the main reason for the disaster. However, a hole in Estonia’s hull was later discovered and filmed by a documentary film crew.
Simulations run on Vilje to calculate the force needed to make the four-meter-high and about 1-meter-wide hole in the hull were conducted by Professor Jørgen Amdahl at the Department of Marine Technology, NTNU. Amdahl's calculations were made using the strength calculation program LS-DYNA, a program that researchers in Trondheim have run on Vilje since the beginning.