NAISS information week 17 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 branches and agreements with universities

NAISS work with establishing branches across Sweden is progressing. We have now had a round of meetings with the operational responsible people within the HPC and related fields at KTH, SU, KI, UU, LU, UmU, CHT, GU, LiU and MDU. A few follow-up meetings will be held at this stage, but in general, the process of establishing branches is going forward. We are also in a dialoge with LTU, and will start it with BTH and ÖrU. At NAISS we are now putting together somewhat of a puzzle to make sure that we can present a specific wish-list of competences to each university that decides to join NAISS on branch-level. We then foresee a final process of discussions leading to a start-up of NAISS branches and their work with users support on basic and middle level around the end of summer.

In parallel, LiU has produced a first draft of a general agreement about participation in NAISS for the other universities that will now be discussed in NAISS steering committee, and then be sent out for review. We foresee that it will be complemented with specific and more detailed branch agreement with each participating branch-university.

Regarding NAISS responsibility to honor SNICs old agreements about existing hardware and services, we have now sent out drafts for such agreements to the previous SNIC-centers for review. Those are in this stage only for 2023 for making the process of starting payments from NAISS faster. But in the cases where there is a lifetime planned after 2023, it is also noted in the documents. Work with the corresponding agreements for 2024 and thereafter will be started after summer.

NAISS homepage

We have published an early version of our NAISS-webpage at www.naiss.se .

At this point, focus is to guide users in need of support or researches that wants to apply for resources right. We are now actively and continuously adding information and functionality to the webpage.

Short-term focus is to fill out the information about present NAISS-resources, add information about NAISS staff and activities as well as editorial and aesthetic improvements. On a little bit longer time-horizon, we are working on updating and porting all the relevant documentation produced by SNIC to the NAISS-web. We are also working on a news-section where focus will be to give users of NAISS-resources the opportunity to highlight popular science pieces about their ground-breaking research results; together with news updates about NAISS and other important information for NAISS users and collaborators.

NAISS work in the area of sensitive data

Questions have been asked for more information about the process of preparing for future resources for sensitive data. NAISS has asked experts on HPC and storage solutions for sensitive data to form a team to urgently investigate, hold a dialoge with relevant actors, and suggest the possible lines of actions for NAISS related to future replacements of the Bianca system. After dialoge with URFIs sensitive data group, universities with experience in the issue and representatives from large user-fields, we are nowing doing our best to speed up the time frame more than the original plan, that was parallel to the investigation for a national site for hardware with decision in Sept-Oct.

Linköping 24 April 2023

Björn Alling