NAISS information week 14 2023

Dear colleagues,

Here comes an update about the build-up of NAISS, the National Academic Infrastructure for Supercomputing in Sweden. Please spread this update to all interested people. For-purpose fit e-mail lists are being prepared for future information e-mails.

NAISS Steering Committee

Following a nomination procedure involving all large Swedish universities, LiUs vice-chancellor decided on the 27 of March to appoint the following Steering Committee for NAISS:

Chair:

  • Jan-Eric Sundgren, senior advisor, Teknikföretagen (until 31 december 2024)

Members:

  • Marianne Sommarin, professor, Umeå University (until 31 december 2024)
  • Thorsten Mauritsen, associate professor, Stockholm university (until 31 december 2024)
  • Susan Aalto, professor, Chalmers (until 31 december 2026)
  • Erik Lindahl, professor, KTH (until 31 december 2026)
  • Bengt Persson, professor, Uppsala university (until 31 december 2026)
  • Anders Ynnerman, professor, Linköping university (until 31 december 2026)

NAISS branches

NAISS has got a firm support for its organizational structure from the top leadership of all former SNIC universities and a few additional universities. During weeks 15 and 16, NAISS will meet with the HPC-related operational leaderships of KTH, SU, KI, UU, UmU, CTH, GU, LU and LiU to concretize the formation of NAISS branches with these nine universities. Discussions about an entry-level participation are continuing with SLU, LTU and MDU.

NAISS homepage

The release date for NAISS web resources is planned to 21 April. Meanwhile some important information, like the minutes of the interim steering committees meetings, these information letters, and information about open calls for NAISS resources through NAC, can be found on the temporal page at naiss.se.

The process of establishing a national site for hardware

Questions have been asked for more information about the process of establishing a national site for hardware. The process of consolidation of hardware towards one national site was one of the key points of the NAISS proposal to VR, answering on suggestions for such a development from the funding agency. The process will be gradual as NAISS takes on the responsibilities of funding the operations of several existing decentralized SNIC systems until their end of life.

The decision about the national site will be taken by NAISS steering committee in the early autumn this year. Before that, there is an investigation group in place working on preparing a basis for this decision. This investigation work starts with establishing which requirements that the national site has to fulfill and which additional evaluation criteria that are to be considered. These requirements and criteria will then be decided on by NAISS steering committee before the summer. They should involve all relevant aspects of quality of services as well as all aspects influencing the reliability and costs for operating the site. Then, the investigation group will apply these criteria in an evaluation of a full range of realistic candidates for the national site. Based on the results, the steering committee will make a decision in September/October.

The investigation group is led by professor Lennart Johnsson, University of Houston. The other members in the investigation group are Niclas Andersson, LiU, Gert Svensson, KTH, Björn Torkelsson, UmU, Mattias Wadenstein, UmU, Thomas Svedberg, Chalmers, Anders Follin, LU, Andreas Håkansson, UU, Andreas Johansson, LiU.

Linköping 7 April 2023

Björn Alling