NCF – Stichting Nationale Computerfaciliteiten – Netherlands Computing Facilities Foundation

The Netherlands Computing Facilities Foundation (NCF) is a foundation under the umbrella of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). NCF is responsible for the policy and funding for the high-end computing infrastructure in the Netherlands for the Science and Research domain, from supercomputers to Grids. NCF is the national body in the Netherlands responsible for national computing infrastructural matters. NCF has a broad HPC-related expertise from benchmarking, system analysis, professional procurement processes, supercomputer market surveys, and policy development.

NCF relation to its third parties

NCF has two third parties in the project: SARA and CIT-RUG. Since the start of High Performance Computing in the Netherlands, NCF’s procurement of Dutch national supercomputers has been done in close collaboration with the Stichting Academisch Rekencentrum Amsterdam (SARA) (SARA Computing and Networking Services). SARA and NCF have many agreements and contracts in place for the delivery of HPC services (computing, data storage, visualization, grid etc.) on a national level. SARA will be the centre to host the future national Petaflop/s system in the Netherlands. NCF and SARA are closely collaborating and are the main partners in the Dutch efforts for the PRACE project.

The Centre for Information Technology at the University of Groningen (CIT-RUG) has been collaborating already with NCF for years in the area of HPC. CIT-RUG has been housing and running various Cray systems, not only for local university usage but also for national users, in the interest of NCF, on the basis of agreements between NCF and CIT-RUG. This has included housing services and software services to scientific users in the Netherlands. Currently, NCF has an agreement with CIT-RUG on exposing their IBM BlueGene system to users on a national level in the Netherlands.