News archive

The 2025 annual report highlights a year of high activity and significant progress for Sigma2 and Norway’s research infrastructure. With several hundred projects, a growing user base, and new national initiatives, the foundation for research and innovation in Norway is being strengthened.

Scaling to a 671-billion parameter LLM is no small feat. When Simula Research Laboratory needed to upgrade the ImproveIT project from single-GPU models to the massive DeepSeek V3, they hit a technical roadblock. Running a model this large required a complex multi-node distributed setup using vLLM on our HPC system, Olivia.

Getting legacy scientific software to compile on a modern HPC system can be a real headache. Olivia. Compiler mismatches and tricky software dependencies are some of the most common reasons researchers lose time on HPC systems.

Now we have significantly expanded the capacity of Norway’s most powerful supercomputer, Olivia, to meet the rapidly increasing demand for GPU-compute in artificial intelligence, research, and general-purpose GPU applications.

This appointment comes at a pivotal time, as Sigma2 establishes itself as a key national player in the Norwegian government’s initiative for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC).

The NIRD Central Data Library (CDL) is a new complimentary service for users of Sigma2’s national research infrastructure, in particular NIRD and the national HPC systems

Researchers in Norway, from academia, industry, and public administration, can now apply for access to national computing and storage resources. This call applies to the allocation period starting on 1 April 2026. The application deadline is Monday, 23 February 2026.

Even though Fram has been shut down, it is not quite “end of life” yet, at least not for all of its components. Unlike the original Fram, the polar vessel that took Fridtjof Nansen to the North Pole and Roald Amundsen to the South Pole, our Fram will not be left to deteriorate and then end up in a museum. Several parts still have high value on the spare‑parts market.

Norway’s leading research environments in language technology are now taking an important step further into the European LLM landscape with access to Europe's larges supercomputers.

Moving established research workflows from one supercomputer to another can be a cumbersome process. However, a recent collaboration between NMBU and the NRIS High-Level Support Team demonstrates that the transition is not only manageable. It can yield massive performance gains.

The opening of KI-fabrikken took place in connection with Minister for Digitalisation and Public Administration Karianne Tung's visit to the Olivia supercomputer on Tuesday.

The government proposes allocating NOK 380 million over the next two years in the 2026 national budget to fund the national supercomputing services.

Earlier this year, the Norwegian government granted a one-time additional allocation to Sigma2 to assist the research community in safeguarding datasets currently stored abroad, which may face the risk of deletion or loss.

The Sensitive Data Services (TSD) that we operate in partnership with the University of Oslo is about to take major step forward with the introduction of Colossus, a new high-performance cluster purpose-built for sensitive data workloads.

In close collaboration our Resource Allocation Committee, we have successfully completed the evaluation of research applications for the second resource allocation period of 2025.

Access to groundbreaking quantum computing to strengthen research and innovation! Now the new quantum computer, VLQ, is inaugurated at the IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center in Ostrava, Czech Republic.

With Olivia's 250-CPU nodes, computations run up to five times faster, accelerating the search for next-generation energy materials. From battery research to rare-earth-free magnets, alloy design, and catalysts, Olivia is transforming VASP-based projects across multiple fields

The global situation has underscored how vital it is to safeguard critical research data. To strengthen resilience, we has accelerated the expansion of NIRD to ensure that Norway’s most important scientific data remains secure, reliable, and accessible for researchers across disciplines.

Norwegian researchers are reporting significant performance gains and a smooth user experience during the pilot phase of Olivia, Sigma2's newest supercomputer. Several Norwegian research teams have had the opportunity to test the new machine, and the results are already highlighting the system's potential.

The pilot projects, which include initiatives from SINTEF Energy, agritech company DigiFarm, and the University of Bergen, have been selected based on specific GPU tasks to be tested. Among other areas, these projects include climate modelling, language models, genome research, and chemical simulations, where machine learning plays a key role in analysing and interpreting large datasets.