Erik Lindahl is moving some of his operations from Stockholm University to a professorship at Linköping University, while taking on the mission as director of NAISS.
“Erik Lindahl isn’t just a prominent researcher who will contribute a lot at LiU. His experience and commitment to the European computing infrastructure will also be a crucial success factor for future research collaborations in Sweden and Europe,” says Deputy Vice-Chancellor Matts Karlsson at Linköping University, which hosts NAISS on behalf of the Swedish Research Council.
Erik Lindahl describes NAISS as a national powerhouse that already has 12 partner universities and will grow even more in importance.
“I look forward to working in an exciting context, being part of a prominent infrastructure, leading highly qualified staff and organising leading AI research in Linköping/Norrköping together with WASP and the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.”
Cooperation with the business community
Erik Lindahl emphasises the importance of developing cooperation with the business community. Academia can learn a lot from businesses’ needs, challenges and agility, but can also contribute solutions. He also sees that the national perspective can easily be geared up.
“NAISS will become a node for European computer infrastructure. It will be a fun challenge to get Swedish researchers to access and contribute to important research in a European context, and also to welcome users from other countries to us. By meeting with and evaluating ourselves in relation to other researchers, we can take big steps forward.”
“There are many research environments that are strong on traditional calculations, but now we are beginning to see the real potential of AI calculations. A good example of this is the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, where scientists over the past 50 years have made gradual progress on calculations, but where AI models took only a few years to solve the problem of predicting the complex structures of proteins.”
High-performance calculations
Matts Karlsson, LiU’s deputy vice-chancellor for research, sees a dramatic increase in the need for high-performance calculations and data storage, and that by hosting NAISS, for instance, LiU is part of increasingly important collaborations such as MAX IV, SciLifeLab, ELLIIT and others.
“We’re currently helping almost 8,000 users from about 30 universities and research institutes, and next year we’ll take another step, when the EuroHPC computer Arrhenius becomes operational. LiU appreciates the confidence shown by the Swedish Research Council and other NAISS parties in having us lead the national infrastructure, and the fact that we can recruit one of Europe’s most merited computational scientists is proof that our strategic investments in data and AI bear fruit,” says Matts Karlsson.
With the recruitment of Erik Lindahl as director, the management of NAISS will also consist of Björn Alling as deputy director, Anna Jänis as head of administration, Niclas Andersson as technical director and Torben Rasmussen as user support manager.
