The purpose of the Icelandic Research e-Infrastructure (IREI) project is to build a powerful, scalable and unified IT platform for scientific work (e-science) in Iceland, a platform needed by active research groups in Icelandic universities and research institutions.
The IREI is built on four services supports: consultancy, storage, processing power and sharing.
Estimated total cost of the project is 845 million ISK in the period 2021 to 2026.
IREI activities are about creating a suitable IT platform and services and initiating provision of IT consultancy for scientists.
The creation of the IT platform will be divided into two major phases: a startup phase and an expansion phase. The startup phase relates to procurement and implementation of HPC hardware, storage systems, backup and sharing solutions and firewall security. It also includes appliances for specific projects: Heilsubrunnur and Mímir II.
In the expansion phase, more resources will be added to the core systems, such as computing resources, HPC nodes, storage, servers and networks. Necessary add-ons will be implemented for integration to other systems outside of the core systems. For example, for sharing data and integrating with cloud service providers.
Initially, IT consultancy services will be focussed on the health sciences. Implementation of Heilsubrunnur will have priority, and later improvement of the Mímir platform for bioinformatics.
Modern scientific research makes ever greater demands on information technology. Disciplines that have no obvious connection to information technology still rely on accessible and powerful information technology infrastructure. At the same time, technology has become more complex. It is a challenging gap for individual science projects to span.
The vision of a unified e-infrastructure for science has been gaining growing support for some time. The need for a powerful, scalable and unified IT platform designed for universities and research institutions has become more evident every year: a platform that can provide for consultancy, storage, secure data discovery, searching and collection, including scientific feasibility of studies, data organisation, processing power and sharing services.
Research projects in every scientific discipline need cost-effective and accessible data storage for research data, processing power for modelling, sharing services for cooperation and publication and high-quality consulting to make all of this work together in the confines of a specific project.
Facilities and platforms are available today, that are used with great success to address a portion of these information technology demands. Yet scientists and researchers still spend time and effort outside their area of expertise, meeting information technology demands. A large portion of science projects could benefit greatly from better access to an e-infrastructure that readily provides relevant information technology solutions, freeing up resources for the research subject at hand.
The proposed e-infrastructure platform is envisioned as meeting those demands and enabling researchers to focus on valuable research. It should also be flexible to support future information technology demands. The e-infrastructure project will provide opportunities for higher learning and expert knowledge and make Iceland more viable in international science collaboration.
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