Supercomputer infrastructure in Sweden

NAISS infrastructure for Swedish academic research

Overview of NAISS

Since the start of 2023, NAISS , which is funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR), has had overall responsibility for the infrastructure providing supercomputer and data storage resources for academic research in Sweden. NAISS partners with Swedish universities to make these resources, as well as high-performance computing (HPC) training and user support, available to researchers. In addition, Sweden owns a share of the EuroHPC JU LUMI  petascale system, which is hosted in Finland. (The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, or EuroHPC JU, is a joint initiative between the EU, European countries and private partners to develop a world-class supercomputing ecosystem in Europe, part of which involves providing funding for extremely large supercomputing systems, like LUMI, for European research.) Access to Sweden's share of LUMI is administered by NAISS.

Prior to 2023, an earlier organisation known as the Swedish National Infrastructure for Supercomputing ( SNIC ) was responsible for HPC resources, as well as training and support, which were provided through supercomputer centres hosted at six of the Swedish universities.

Physical HPC infrastructure in Sweden

The supercomputer, cloud and storage systems that were established at the six supercomputer centres under SNIC are continuing and being funded by NAISS until the ends of their life cycles. Meanwhile, NAISS is working on establishing a single site in Sweden where future new NAISS supercomputer resources will be housed. This change in approach arises from the trend towards, and need for, extremely large pre-exascale and exascale systems to facilitate research in the future.

The six main academic supercomputer centres in Sweden are:

• the Chalmers Centre for Computational Science and Engineering  (C3SE) at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, which hosts the Alvis accelerator-based NAISS system dedicated to research using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques,

• the High Performance Computing Center North  (HPC2N) at Umeå University,

• Lunarc  at Lund University,

• the National Supercomputer Centre  at Linköping University, which hosts the NAISS general-purpose computational resource Tetralith and the AI system Berzelius for the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program,

• the PDC Center for High Performance Computing at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, which hosts the NAISS general-purpose Dardel system, and

• the Uppsala Multidisciplinary Centre for Advanced Computational Science  (UPPMAX) at Uppsala University, which hosts the NAISS systems Bianca (for analysing sensitive data) and Rackham (for life sciences research).

As a part of the systems hosted at these centres, NAISS provides the Swedish Science Cloud and the Swestore data storage infrastructure, both of which are hosted by several of those centres.

Where to apply to use NAISS resources

Swedish academic researchers can apply to use the NAISS systems and data storage resources hosted at these Swedish centres through NAISS - for details, see the NAISS allocations page . Information about applying for an allocation on the Swedish share of the LUMI system is available on the NAISS page for the LUMI resource .

User support

NAISS has agreements with various Swedish universities (which are referred to as NAISS support branches in this context) to provide user support for academic researchers who use the NAISS systems. Previously, user support had primarly been organised on a local level so that researchers needing assistance to utilise a resource hosted at a particular HPC centre would receive help from application experts and/or other support/systems staff at that centre. The new NAISS approach provides a form of distributed user support which means that Swedish researchers will be able to get help from the application experts/support personnel in Sweden who have the most expertise in the relevant research area, regardless of where those experts (or the researchers) are located in Sweden.

How KTH, PDC and NAISS cooperate

NAISS itself is hosted by Linköping University but acts independently with a national perspective and responsibility. NAISS has established partnership agreements with the major Swedish research universitities, including KTH. KTH and PDC work together with NAISS in several ways to provide HPC resources and user support for Swedish research.

• As mentioned, KTH is a partner of NAISS. In this respect, PDC (as KTH’s representative within NAISS) may be referred to as a member or key collaborator of NAISS.
• PDC is one of the centres providing user support for researchers using NAISS resources. As such, PDC is known as a support branch of NAISS.
• PDC operates the Dardel system on behalf of NAISS. It is expected that PDC will continue to do this until the system is retired from use by NAISS. Note that some parts of Dardel are funded by KTH to be available for business/industry research projects or are funded by specific companies or organisations for their own research.

Using resources at PDC for industry R&D

Part of the Dardel system at PDC is funded separately by KTH so it can be used by businesses for industry research purposes. Companies can make arrangements directly with PDC to use this part of Dardel. Further information is available here  about using PDC’s services for business research, and information about the prices for using HPC resources hosted at PDC for business/industry research can be found here .