Norwegian Competence Centre for HPC

EuroHPC Joint Undertaking facilitates the set-up of National Competence Centres in every partner-state to provide permanent support to Big Industry and SMEs (Small Medium Enterprises) future users. Competence Centres will amongst other activities, support industry users to adopt or increase HPC (high-Performance computing) usage.

In Norway, Sigma2 is leading the Norwegian Competence Centre, with SINTEF and NORCE as partners. (See NORCE's news article New Competence Centre for HPC in Norwegian)

Mastering HPC/HPDA in all its dimensions is decisive for European Industry to stay competitive in the global market, thus EuroHPC prepares to contribute in several areas:

• Transfer knowledge between research and European Industry
• Develop a co-design approach between technology providers and advanced users
• Take into account inputs from Industry Community, listing the specific needs and requirements
• Support SME´s in changing their applications to run on highly parallel environments

Science and research organizations have a strong history of using HPC within medicine, astronomy, microbiology, physics, chemistry, aerospace and so forth. Many commercial industries have HPC as a core function within their business.

• Oil and gas exploration, where processing a vast amount of data from seismic and CSEM seabed logging is key to understand where to invest in field developments.
• Semiconductor and electronics development, where using HPC to simulate the product´s functionality and finding faults before entering physical production, substantially reduces time to market and cost, as well as enabling development in the nanoscale area.
• In the financial sector, where analysing a vast amount of data and modelling scenarios help understand risk, forecast changes, make robotic decisions and detect fraud in real-time.
• Automotive and aerospace industry, where calculating and modelling construction strength and aerodynamics help develop more efficient and secure transportation.
• In the entertainment industry, where CGI help to produce scenes and movies that would be too expensive or dangerous to make without HPC.
• Life science, where using HPC help reducing development time for new medicines and allow data analysis of extremely large datasets.

The competence centre offers training and competence transfer within topics related to  

• high-performance computing (HPC) 
• high-performance-data-analysis (HPDA) 
• artificial intelligence (AI) 
• machine learning (ML)

and other important aspects around digitalization challenges, such as data management and awareness.  

We typically arrange and finance training on an on-demand basis, and we also disseminate and coordinate external training offerings.  

Through our collaboration with competence centres across the other 32 countries in the EuroCC project, you also get a wider offer of topics. 

You find more information about training activities further down on this web page. 

Through the competence centre, your company gets access to competence within HPC, HPDA, ML, AI, and other digitalization aspects at your disposal. We aid our customers in best practices in: 

• software development 
• Maintenance 
• Testing 
• Execution 
• optimizations, and 
• data management and analysis towards scaling in highly parallel environments.  

Furthermore, we aid in the process of understanding the potential of, implementing, and optimizing digital workflows, adapting and implementing digital solutions to specific domains that are important to your business. This also includes contact with domain-specific and business development competencies.  

This makes it possible to abstract away the technicalities of HPC, HPDA, AI, ML and others so that you can spend time on discovering and creating value in environments known to your employees.  

These types of services are free of charge for industrial users and public services, enabled by the EuroCC project. 

The core mission of EuroCC is to aid industry and public services in increasing your competence in and adoption of HPC, HPDA, AI and ML technologies. We want you to gain added value through, i.e. increased efficiencies, quality of service, innovations and competitive advantages. 

It is our goal to disseminate the advantages of adopting HPC, HPDA, AI, ML and digitalization concepts. Communicating experiences and sharing success stories are means to reach this goal.  

The dissemination helps both to demonstrate the benefits of adopting modern technologies.  We strive to give you generalized and easily adoptable solutions wherever possible, to lower the barrier of approachability and on-boarding of new customers. 

We collaboration in networks and with hubs focusing on  

• digital innovation (EDIH) 
• specific domains 
• AI/ML 
• data management 
• privacy and security, and 
• innovation 

to reach a broader audience and to be able to provide your company with a broader concatenated portfolio of services. 

We provide more complete services since our collaboration activities are not bound by the Norwegian border. This includes competencies as well as potential synergies in setting up collaboration between customers across Europe. 

Any training and knowledge transfer in the service offerings are eligible under the EuroCC project, in addition to work on software, policies, routines, business development, etc. not considered production-ready.

The competence centre is more than happy to realize services outside the eligibility of the EuroCC project, which can be realized at market cost or through projects utilizing available funding schemes. For the latter approach, access to the partners’ competence in obtaining relevant funding in collaboration with customers can be utilized. 

The Competence Centre partner Sigma2 implements the national e-infrastructure for public research, which includes resources for many types of computational needs including AI. This infrastructure is funded by the Research Council of Norway together with the four oldest universities in Norway.

Through Sigma2, the Competence Centre can provide free of charge Small Scale Explorative Work (SSEW) services to try out an idea or for testing before investing (up to 20.000 CPU hours). Sigma2 is also allowed to sell up to 5% of the total capacity to commercial customers, but state regulations require that such services are sold at prices comparable to open market price. 

Please contact us if you wish to know more about how NCC can help you. 

Roger Kvam
Leader Norwegian Euro Competence Centre for Supercomputing

telephone: +47 922 95 777
e-mail: roger.kvam@uninett.no