On May 27, 2020, the LUMI Strategic Committee approved Iceland as the tenth member country of the LUMI consortium, joining Finland, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland. The decision brought all five Nordic countries into the consortium for the first time. LUMI (Large Unified Modern Infrastructure) is one of the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking’s (EuroHPC JU) pre-exascale supercomputers, hosted at CSC’s data center in Kajaani, Finland.
Professor Ebba Thora Hvannberg of the University of Iceland said at the time that access to LUMI’s large-scale resources would be “a large step forward” for a country with a small population, enabling new possibilities in simulation sciences and artificial intelligence research. Iceland’s membership was facilitated through its participation in the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, of which Iceland is an associated country.
LUMI later acquired a quantum computing module through the LUMI-Q project, selected by the EuroHPC JU in 2022 to host one of six new European quantum computers. Iceland’s consortium membership provides its researchers with access to this hybrid high-performance and quantum computing infrastructure.