Retired Hardware

Before HPC2N existed, three of the current partners (Umeå University, Luleå University, and The Swedish Institute for Space Physics - IRF) collaborated under Supercomputer Center North (SDCN), providing cost-effective, nation-wide service for scientific and technical computing since 1989. Aside from this, they also ran a program for competence and knowledge devlopment in high-performance computing.

With the founding of HPC2N in 1996, two other partners were added - Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) and Mid-Sweden University.

Originally, SDCN had an IBM 3090VF-600 multiprocessor system. More machines followed after the founding of HPC2N, with the first of these arriving in January 1997.

The research in high-performance computing at the department of Computing Science at Umeå University has since long been focused on design of algorithms, tools and environments for parallel machines.

SDCN/Umeå University was one of the official test sites during the development of the high-performance linear algebra subroutine library LAPACK. The department of Computing Science has also contributed to LAPACK with software based on results from own research. Other important contributions include the GEMM-based Level 3 BLAS and the Conlab environment.

There are many research activities connected to high-performance computing at the various HPC2N partner-sites.
At the Technical University of Luleå, high-performance computing and computational research is done in many technical and engineering applications and advanced ab-initio simulations in physics and in Computer Aided Design.
The Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF) in Kiruna have demands for high-performance computing in many areas. Several departments at Umeå University, e.g., Physical Chemistry, Medical Biophysics, Theoretical Physics and Space Physics, and in Psychology are using high-performance computing in computation intensive simulation techniques. Also the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Umeå has experience in using scalable parallel computers.

In general, research activities related to high-performance computing and applications requiring high-performance computing has taken place and continues to take place on departments in mathematical sciences, biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, medicine, agricultural sciences, social sciences and humanities.