The Research Council of Norway
Encyclopedia
The Research Council of Norway is a Norwegian
Norway
Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

 government agency
Etat
Etat is a Norwegian state-, county- or municipal agency. An Etat is a subdivision of the administration, which has been given responsibility for a special area. An agency does not have a board of directors, but it does have a director, appointed by the subordinate organization. Normally decisions...

 responsible for awarding grands for research
Research
Research can be defined as the scientific search for knowledge, or as any systematic investigation, to establish novel facts, solve new or existing problems, prove new ideas, or develop new theories, usually using a scientific method...

 as well as promoting research and science
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...

. It also advises the Government in matters related to research, and is subordinate the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research
Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research
Royal Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research is a Norwegian responsible for education, research and kindergartens. The ministry was established in 1814, and since October 18, 2007 led by Tora Aasland and Kristin Halvorsen in 2009. The department reports to the legislature...

. The Research Council of Norway total budget in 2009 amounted to NOK 6 165 million.

Background

There were five predecessors of the council, each established as independent councils related to their own areas of interest: science and technology (1946), social sciences (1949), agriculture (1949), fisheries (1972) and applied social sciences (1987). The five were merged in 1993 to form the current council.

The Research Council of Norway's main office is located at Stenberggata 26 in Oslo
Oslo
Oslo is a municipality, as well as the capital and most populous city in Norway. As a municipality , it was established on 1 January 1838. Founded around 1048 by King Harald III of Norway, the city was largely destroyed by fire in 1624. The city was moved under the reign of Denmark–Norway's King...

. The Research Council has appointed local representatives in nine different regions of Norway.

Awards

  • The Award for Outstanding Research (Møbius Prize) - rewards excellence in research, nationally as well as internationally. Award-winners receive the sum of NOK 500 000 and the Møbius statuette.
  • The Award for Excellence in Communication of Science - given to a researcher who has demonstrated outstanding ability and innovation in communicating the results of his or her research. It comprises a cash prize of NOK 200 000 and may be conferred for communication in connection with ongoing or completed research activity.

Notur

The Notur project provides the national infrastructure for high-performance computing in Norway. The project serves the Norwegian computational science community by providing the infrastructure to individuals or groups involved in
  • education and research at Norwegian universities, university colleges and research organizations
  • operational forecasting at the Meteorological Institute
  • research and engineering at other organizations and industry who wish to collaborate with the project.


The Notur project aims to provide a powerful and cost-effective infrastructure for computational science and enable its efficient utilization. In addition, the project shall contribute to the development of a national grid infrastructure, be proactive in international collaboration on infrastructure and computational science, and disseminate computational science as an important discipline in Norway.

The Notur project is funded by the Research Council of Norway and the university partners. The Research Council of Norway entered into a 10-year agreement (2005-2014) with UNINETT Sigma. UNINETT Sigma is the coordinator of the project and entered into agreements with consortium partners
  • NTNU - Norwegian University of Science and Technology
    Norwegian University of Science and Technology
    The Norwegian University of Science and Technology , commonly known as NTNU, is located in Trondheim. NTNU is the second largest of the eight universities in Norway, and, as its name suggests, has the main national responsibility for higher education in engineering and technology...

    , Trondheim
  • UiB - University of Bergen
    University of Bergen
    The University of Bergen is located in Bergen, Norway. Although founded as late as 1946, academic activity had taken place at Bergen Museum as far back as 1825. The university today serves more than 14,500 students...

  • UiO - University of Oslo
    University of Oslo
    The University of Oslo , formerly The Royal Frederick University , is the oldest and largest university in Norway, situated in the Norwegian capital of Oslo. The university was founded in 1811 and was modelled after the recently established University of Berlin...

  • UiT - University of Tromsø
    University of Tromsø
    The University of Tromsø is the world's northernmost university. Located in the city of Tromsø, Norway, it was established in 1968, and opened in 1972. It is one of eight universities in Norway. The University of Tromsø is the largest research and educational institution in northern Norway...

  • met.no - Meteorological Institute


Since January 2006, the Notur project placed under the eVITA programme from the Research Council of Norway.

NorGrid

The National Grid Initiative of Norway is NorGrid. The NorGrid initiative aims to establish and maintain a national grid infrastructure in Norway.

The NorGrid project was initially established as a subactivity of the Norwegian infrastructure project Notur for high-performance computing. In March 2007, NorGrid was recognized by the Research Council of Norway as a separate initiative with its own funding.

A detailed description of the mission, organization and status of NorGrid can be found on the home pages for NorGrid.

The coordinating legal entity of the NorGrid initiative is UNINETT Sigma. NorGrid includes the national Norwegian NREN (UNINETT), the University of Bergen (UiB) and its affiliated research organization Unifob, the University of Oslo (UiO) and the University of Tromsø (UiT).

NorGrid collaborates with the Nordic Data Grid Facility (NDGF), a collaboration between the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden), on the operations and support for the Nordic Tier-1 center that is part of the WLCG collaboration. NDGF is hosted by NORDUnet.

NorGrid is funded in part by the Research Council of Norway through the eVITA programme on e-Science.

NorStore

The objective of the NorStore project is to provide infrastructure in Norway for the curation of digital scientific data. The infrastructure must provide services for easy and secure access to distributed storage resources, facilitate the creation and use of digital scientific repositories, provide large aggregate capacities for storage and data transfer, and optimize the utilization of the overall storage capacity.

Long-term objectives of the NorStore project include:
  • to operate a reliable infrastructure for the storage of digital data for Norwegian research
  • deploy and enable the development of services for data curation that add value to the existing e-Infrastructure
  • provide capacity and services for the long-term storage of digital data
  • to facilitate the establishment of digital scientific repositories in a broad range of scientific and technological applications
  • to enable the Norwegian research community to (automatically) benefit from the advances in storage technologies
  • contribute to the unification of interfaces to storage resources within Norway and abroad.


The project is funded in part by the Research Council of Norway through the eVITA programme on e-Science.

External links

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