History

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. You can read more about the old, retired hardware systems of HPC2N, by going to the "Old Systems" page.

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.