As many researchers experience a growing need to store and analyse data in large volumes, the scale of digitalisation has rocket-launched results in several scientific fields.
Data has a central role in everything we do. Every second of the day we and the systems surrounding us generate data without us even thinking about it. Analysing vast amounts of collected data can give scientists unprecedented insight and collected data can be used to generate new knowledge.
This is of course not just a possibility; it is also a challenge. Handling vast amounts of data is both tricky and time-consuming. First, the data needs to be stored and structured. Then we can look for hidden patterns, and correlations, which we never thought of before, as the data is processed, analysed, curated, and shared with communities and made useful to us.
We find that the NIRD Service Platform is essential to many research environments consuming data on NIRD through services. NIRD Service Platform can host any service. Services can have a permanent web address (Platform-as-a-Service) or be launched on-demand on the NIRD Toolkit (Software-as-a-Service).
On-demand data analytics services, such as AI/ML/DL algorithms, are available through the NIRD Toolkit. Here you can click and install the most popular data analytics tools, such as:
- Apache Spark
- RStudio
- Jupyter
- JupyterHub
- MinIO
- Deep Learning Tools
NIRD Toolkit is free of charge for all NIRD storage users.
GPU computing power is also available through Toolkit to facilitate the processing of your data, and run your AI/ML workloads on the NIRD Service Platform.
This is new in the NIRD Toolkit
We have improved NIRD Toolkit to allow easier authentication and enhance the user experience.
Even if you might not notice, more the 89000 lines of code have been changed to increase security, improve user-friendliness and pave the way to further development. For instance, including more tools in the NIRD Toolkit got easier.
Contact us if you need different software in the Toolkit!
Easier authentication
The in-build and simplified authentication mechanism is lauched, allowing all NIRD Toolkit users to authenticate with Feide without any cumbersome detours or procedures.
Increased security
The code of the NIRD Toolkit is rewritten to increase security and manageability of the code. This includes invisible, but significant, under the hood code refreshing, security fixes, framework modernizing and much more.
More user-friendliness
The front end of the NIRD Toolkit is redesigned to be more user-friendly with a modern look and a universal design. You can log in and submit jobs from any portable device!
How do I access NIRD Toolkit?
To access the NIRD Toolkit, please go to apps.sigma2.no. Services launched through the NIRD Toolkit can also be accessed by external users. If this applies to you, you authenticate through the Feide service.
If you are the project leader / executive officer, you can authorize other members of your project group to deploy NIRD Toolkit applications, by managing the group in Feide. For more information, please check out the getting started guide for the NIRD Toolkit.
For more information check out the getting started guide and if you have any questions, don´t not hesitate to contact us
If you have a storage project on NIRD and you want to get access to the NIRD Toolkit, contact the administration.
Analyse, visualise and share data on NIRD Service Platform
NIRD Service Platform is a Kubernetes-based infrastructure, to run several types of services and software, such as web services, domain and community-specific portals, and tools for data visualization, data discovery and data sharing.
Your favourite software can be migrated to the NIRD Service Platform, using the same software pipeline, and libraries as for example on your desktop, but giving access to the vast amount of data stored on NIRD. You can analyse and visualise massive data stored on NIRD – all in one place, without moving data.
Portals running on the NIRD Service Platform allow the projects to share data and collaborate with external partners. A NIRD project can have a dedicated login container, customized with tools specific to the project, to run data-intensive pre-/post-processing analysis without moving data.
About NIRD
NIRD – the National Infrastructure for Research Data is an eco-system of storage services designed to support your scientific research in every step of the Research Data Life Cycle – from data planning to data collection and storage, to data analysis and finally data sharing, archiving and re-use.
The services run in containers to ensure high portability of the tools and reproducibility of the results. That is, containers and tools running on the NIRD Service Platform can easily be exported and run on public cloud. By employing the NIRD Service Platform, you can run services and have dedicated resources for data discovery and data-intensive computing on a large amount of data.
This article was first published on 15 September 2022 and contained the then-upcoming changes to the NIRD Toolkit. It has now been updated with new information.