News archive

Earlier this week, the National Library of Norway launched new Norwegian language models in the Borealis series. Borealis is a growing family of language models, containing models for Bokmål, Nynorsk and Sami. Sigma2 provides national computing resources for the Borealis models.

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 October 2026. The application deadline is Monday, 26 August 2026.

When a researcher wanted to run SCINE Chemoton, an open-source framework for automated exploration of chemical reaction networks, on Sigma2 infrastructure, she faced a challenge. Read how NRIS experts helped design a hybrid NREC-HPC solution that enabled a flexible and scalable research workflow.

Following a successful pilot period, we are pleased to announce that the NIRD Central Data Library (CDL) has been enhanced with long-awaited caching capabilities.

The NIRD Research Data Archive has introduced a major upgrade to its search functionality. The update significantly improves the user experience for discovering research datasets.

What happens when a researcher with a complex data pipeline connects with HPC expertise? At UiT Norges arktiske universitet, the answer is improved efficiency, stronger reproducibility, and a fully automated workflow.

Sigma2 is expanding, and we are now recruiting for several new positions across key areas of our organisation. Demand for advanced computing and AI resources is growing rapidly, and we are strengthening our team to meet new opportunities and challenges.

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.