SNIC Transition News

The Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) has been responsible for providing large-scale compute and data storage resources, along with training and practical expertise, to support high-quality Swedish academic research since 2003. The situation is about to change as that responsibility will be transitioned to a new national infrastructure from the start of next year. It is likely that the new infrastructure will be known as the National Academic Infrastructure for Supercomputing (NAIS); that is the new organisation that has been proposed jointly by the major Swedish universities. The application is in the process of being evaluated by the Swedish Council of Research Infrastructures with a decision expected in late June.

 Academic researchers who are using the SNIC infrastructure are naturally wondering if this upcoming change will impact their research. Putting it briefly, the intention is that, if the new organisation is approved, then SNIC and NAIS would work together to make the transition as seamless as possible from the perspective of the researchers using the resources, with NAIS taking over the existing SNIC resources and continuing to operate them throughout the remainder of their lifetimes. As the high-performance and high-throughput computing landscape is changing so rapidly, there are naturally many factors to take into consideration so that world-class resources will continue to be available for Swedish research.

To keep everyone informed about the transition process, SNIC will be publishing several newsletters over the course of this year. The first newsletter is available from the SNIC website (see snic.se/digitalAssets/605/c_605288-l_1-k_snic-newsletter-2022-1.pdf ) and provides more details about the transition and the steps SNIC is taking to ensure there will be sufficient capability and capacity in the coming years.