SNIC – Vetenskapsrådet – Swedish Research Council

SNIC is chartered by the Swedish Research Council to coordinate High-End Computing for academic research and manages its high-end computing funding. The Mission of SNIC is to provide access to diverse computational and storage resources, within budget limitations, to all of Swedish research on a merit basis. SNIC is the steward of the HPC Ecosystem in Sweden, and as such is the organization to assure the PRACE Research Infrastructure can be accessed by Swedish researchers on a meritorious basis, and that the Swedish national HPC infrastructure is properly integrated into European HPC and Grid Ecosystems. It is also the organization, in collaboration with the Research Councils Committee for Research Infrastructures (KFI), to commit funding and other resources to PRACE. SNIC has six associated HPC centres, one at each of six Universities, responsible for delivering HPC services to the Swedish academic community. SNIC and its associated centres form a Joint Research Unit (JRU). The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) via its High-Performance Computing (HPC) Centre PDC, Linkoping University via its HPC centre NSC and Umea University via its HPC centre HPC2N all included in the JRU will participate in the first implementation-phase of PRACE. SNIC has authorized KTH to lead its participation in PRACE. SNIC and its affiliated centres will be engaged in all Work Packages. SNIC contributes funded efforts starting from WP2 to WP9.

The SNIC affiliated centres have a several years of experience in collaborating with each other in regards to Swedish and European projects related to HPC Ecosystems and Grids. SNIC centres have expertise in adopting and maturing software systems for leading edge technologies, systems management tools development, including accounting systems for distributed environments, user training and support, performance tools and application development in both classical areas for HPC such as weather and climate applications, computational fluid dynamics, computational electro-magnetics, molecular systems simulations and material science, as well as new areas, such as bioinformatics, biomedicine and neuroinformatics.