Trondheim, Norway June 10 – Sigma2 AS, Norway’s official provider of national e-infrastructure resources for research, has announced its collaboration with Iris.ai, providing substantial levels of High-Performance Computing capacity on Norwegian Saga and EU Large Unified Modern Infrastructure (LUMI) supercomputers. Iris.ai is a provider of an AI engine for scientific text understanding, and the collaboration is part of Sigma 2’s mission to promote research and scientific innovation in Norway.
Through its collaboration with the National Competence Centre for HPC (NCC), Sigma2 is at the forefront of addressing the computational needs critical for advanced industrial research and development. By providing access to its formidable HPC resources, Sigma2 supports projects that require extensive computing power, from scientific simulations to AI-driven research.
Through the resource grant, Iris.ai will use the resources to develop its Machine Learning models that underpin its RSpace, a scalable platform that provides researchers with the best AI technologies.
The collaboration is an example of how start-ups and researchers can bridge technological divides, ensuring Norwegian organizations of all sizes can harness the power of high-performance computing (HPC) and AI to fulfill their innovative potential. With the limited global supply of compute resources being dominated by chip providers from Silicon Valley, many start-ups have to look to other sources for the necessary AI hardware.
“Empowering organizations like Iris.ai with the support and computational resources they need is a step toward levelling the playing field in AI research and development,” said Roger Kvam, Leader of the National Competence Centre for HPC in Norway, hosted by Sigma2. “Our infrastructure can be leveraged to support innovation at SMEs and startups that are often the birthplaces of groundbreaking ideas, but who can lack the hardware capacity to enable their ambitions.”
Anita Schjøll Abildgaard, CEO of Iris.ai, said “High-performance computing is incredibly valuable, especially when you consider the scarcity of supply. The capacity offered by Sigma2 allow us to work on both training and developing more resource-intensive models from scratch, which would otherwise be unobtainable right now.
“The initiative will greatly support us in building services that help researchers innovate faster. Generative AI has huge potential to help researchers gain full control of the research process and interrogate their data sets with confidence, but it needs to be supported by large hardware capacity. We look forward to continuing to work with Sigma2 and the National Competence Centre for HPC.”