As the owner of the national e-infrastructure, Sigma2 bears a vital strategic responsibility for systems and services, overseeing the complex landscape of large-scale data and computational science.
One of our key objectives is to strongly emphasis procuring new HPC and storage equipment. We are also engaged in development projects aimed at enhancing the national services.
Our current strategy involves a dual-track HPC system service, wherein a new system is installed every second year, with each system expected to have a four-year operational lifetime.
It's important to note that the procurements listed below adhere to Norwegian public sector procurement laws.
Active projects
Procurement: 3rd generation NIRD
A project to aquire the 3rd generation national storage infrastructure, the 3rd generation NIRD (National Infrastructure for Research Data). The new system will replace the current 2nd generation NIRD system and provide modern, high-performance, scalable, and secure long-term data storage, along with advanced data services for Norwegian research.
Procurement: NIRD Tape Library
A project to establish tape as a fully integrated storage tier within NIRD (National Infrastructure for Research Data).
To the NIRD Tape Library project page
Procurement: Supercomputer B2 "Betzy Next"
A project to acquire and implement the next-generation national CPU-based HPC supercomputer. "Betzy Next" will be placed at Lefdal Mine Datacenter, alongside the A2 system (Olivia) and the national storage infrastructure (NIRD).
Data Centric Model
The Data Centric Model is Sigma2's strategic response to the convergence of HPC, cloud, and AI workloads and leads with the Sigma2’s strategic vision of user in focus.
Rather than attaching dedicated storage to each compute facility, NIRD (Norwegian Infrastructure for Research Data) becomes the shared, persistent data plane for all compute systems.
Completed projects
Procurement: Supercomputer A2 "Olivia"
The procurement of supercomputer Olivia, the first national supercomputer to be placed at Lefdal Mine Data Centers.
Development: New data research archive
This development project aims to design and develop Sigma2`s next-next generation Research Data Archive.
Procurement: New national storage system (NIRD)
The project to procure the next generation Norwegian Infrastructure for Research Data (NIRD) was completed in 2022.
Procurement: Data centre facilities
The project to procure data centre facilities to host the national e-infrastrucutre was completed in 2021.
Procurement project: Two new HPC systems (ANS 2018)
Two separate competitions were conducted, resulting in national supercomputers Betzy (2020) and Saga (2019).
Both systems are installed at NTNU in Trondheim.
Procurement project: One new HPC system and a storage facility (ANS 2016)
The national supercomputer FRAM and the national storage system NIRD were procured in 2016 and 2017, respectively.
Fram is located in Tromsø, and the first-generation NIRD was located at two locations; Tromsø and Trondheim.
