New Director, Partners and Branches for NAISS

New NAISS Director: Professor Erik Lindahl

Linköping University’s Vice-Chancellor, Jan- Ingvar Jönsson, appointed Professor Erik Lindahl as the new director of the National Academic Infrastructure for Supercomputing in Sweden (NAISS) on the 11th of November 2024. Eric will begin his role as the director on the 1st of January 2025. Erik has been involved in NAISS from its start as deputy chair of the steering committee. He is a leading scientist in the field of biophysics and has extensive experience within Swedish and international high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructures. Björn Alling will continue as acting director until the end of this year and will then continue to work for NAISS in a role supporting Erik from the start of 2025.

Upcoming NAISS & EuroHPC System Arrhenius

NAISS and the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) have agreed on the technical specifications for the procurement of the Arrhenius system and the call for proposals has gone out to the vendors. The deadline for submissions is set to the 31st of January 2025. The plan is for the CPU and storage parts of Arrhenius, including sensitive data, to be brought online during the autumn of 2025. Due to a very high demand in the market for relevant components, the GPU part of the system is expected to be delivered a few months later.

NAISS Partners and Branches

On the 1st of July 2024, Linnaeus University in Småland became the twelfth NAISS partner university, and Luleå Technical University became the eleventh NAISS partner on the 1st of January, while the original ten partner universities have been on board since the start of NAISS in 2023.

Branch agreements for NAISS branches at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Linköping University, Lund University and Umeå University have now been signed. Chalmers and NAISS are practically in agreement while some more negotiations will be held with Uppsala University. There have also been signals from one of the entry- level NAISS partners that they would like to level up and start a NAISS branch in the near future.