New AI infrastructure project funded by the Research Council of Norway

The purpose of the NAIC is to bring together the leading AI expertise currently spread out at different sites in Norway and to consolidate the existing infrastructure and competence while supplementing each site with additional resources and knowledge to enable a national resource pool. The result will be a national e-infrastructure that can provide a broad service portfolio tailored to the needs of academia, public administration and industry. In one aspect, the NAIC e-infrastructure will become more widely available to engaged AI students, researchers and innovators. Additionally, NAIC will promote theconvergence of high-performance computing (HPC) and AI, so that access to sufficient computing power will be secured as national and international resources through NAIC.

The NAIC consortium consists of 8 partners, with UiO as the leading partner along with partners Simula, UiB, NTNU, UiT, UiA, Sigma 2 and NORCE. Simula's role will be to lead the work of technology assessment and contribute its expertise on high-performance AI in general. Moreover, the national research infrastructure eX3 hosted at Simula will provide a unique environment for experimental HPC research, and present users with access to emerging hardware technologies (Graphcore IPUs and Intel Habana Gaudi processors) such as recent GPU accelerators that are useful for AI workloads.

Learn more about this project here in this NORA news article.