The IHPC Community Simulation and Data Labs (SDLs) are interdisciplinary teams of scientists and engineers with complementary skills in Iceland
In response to the many challenges posed by rapid technological innovation in high–performance computing (HPC) hardware, complex simulations at unprecedented scales, and the rapid evolution and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in HPC applications, the IHPC Community comprises scientific and engineering application-domain-specific SDLs to work with HPC users.
Alongside offering a wide variety of tailored HPC training, these SDLs address thematically focused HPC application use cases from academia, industry, startups, small-medium enterprises (SMEs), and the public sector, engaging with HPC users through physics-based simulation science codes or AI support tools. SDLs form a bridge between the ever-increasing complexity of disruptive HPC and quantum computing infrastructure technologies and a specific scientific and engineering research and innovation area. Their purpose is to serve as a point of contact for a specific HPC competency, enabling close collaboration with the broader community of domain-specific applications and user groups in Iceland.
At the time of writing, the IHPC community comprises 15 SDLs from a wide variety of scientific and engineering domains, with high competencies in HPC, quantum, and AI applications, as well as unique skill sets and tool sets, in Iceland.
One of the unique capabilities of these SDLs is that they are mainly scientifically- and academically-driven, yet maintain very close collaborations with the Icelandic private sector, including startups and SMEs, as well as renowned Public Sector Organisations (PSOs) in Iceland. The IHPC web page lists numerous testimonials and success stories about working with those close collaborators.
There has been a growth in SDLs in recent years, driven by the increasing capabilities of Icelandic experts in HPC and AI, which, in part, can also be attributed to the acquisition of several EU projects in this area, thus significantly supporting the IHPC community. Fig. 1 provides an overview of the Icelandic SDL domains, briefly introduced to understand their focused application domain-specific areas. More details are provided on the IHPC community web page. Members of the SDLs are from various academic organisations, such as the University of Iceland (UICE), the University of Reykjavik (RU), and the Meteorological Office of Iceland (IMO).
IHPC community competencies
The Algorithmic Mathematics Lab conducts research on permutation patterns – a very active area with connections to many other fields of mathematics, computer science, and physics. The major competencies of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) Lab are the development and training of expansive language models for Icelandic and other low-resource languages, including Large Language Models (LLMs), using HPC, and developing approaches to support European values in those models.
The Quantum Simulation and Data Science Lab members have experience developing and applying ab initio-based methods and scientific software for quantum materials modelling and atomistic simulations under external stimuli, such as light and electric/magnetic fields. The SDL Acoustic and Tactile Engineering (ACUTE) has a track record of creating wearable assistive devices tailored for visually impaired individuals and cochlear implant recipients, and leverages its anechoic chamber as a unique infrastructure asset in Iceland. The SDL Computational Chemistry group advances theory and methodology for atomic-scale simulations, with broad-ranging applications in chemistry and physical chemistry, reaction rate theory, adsorption spectroscopy, and magnetism.
Members of the SDL Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) work on traditional physics-based HPC applications, but also, more recently, on CFD advancements using deep learning methods to broaden understanding of fluid flows, using wind-tunnel validation data, with broad-ranging applications, especially in renewable energy, such as wind power. Also, working more on traditional physics-based applications of HPC, the SDL Computational Physics focuses on electrical, optical, and transport properties of nanoscale semiconductor systems, two-dimensional electron gases in semiconductor heterostructures, quasi-one-dimensional electron systems in quantum wires, and quasi-zero-dimensional electron systems in quantum dots.
The SDL Health and Medicine (HM) researches novel data analysis approaches in the medical field, such as swarm and federated learning in innovative HPC system environments, enabling disruptive methods for processing patient medical data and assisting with diagnosis and treatment. While collaborating closely with the HM lab, the SDL Neuroscience members have core expertise in 3D medical image analysis of the human brain and in advancing engineering techniques to provide detailed insights into brain anatomy. Also, members of the SDL Remote Sensing are internationally renowned for being at the forefront of using HPC and Quantum Computing to enhance interdisciplinary research at the intersection of remote sensing applications and large-scale AI methods.
The goal of the SDL Software Engineering for HPC is to bundle and offer expertise to HPC community collaborators on the development, maintenance, testing, and design of software, with a particular focus on HPC software environments. The quite scientifically driven Supramolecular and Inorganic Chemistry Lab focuses on developing supramolecular gels as creation and crystallisation media and on evaluating the potential applications of coordination compounds in sorption studies, anion recognition, catalysis, and as anticancer agents. In contrast, and much more applied, the SDL Statistical Weather Lab uses AI and classical time-series analysis to model deviations in atmospheric model output relative to meteorological measurements, thereby contributing to improved weather forecasts in close collaboration with the IMO. More recently, the SDL Statistical Engineering Seismology was added to the IHPC labs, performing research to develop transparent, testable, and uncertainty-aware methods that connect near-real-time seismicity information to short-term forecasts and time-dependent hazard and risk metrics, with emphasis on Iceland’s tectonic and volcano-tectonic environments. Finally, another SDL was formed, recently named Time Series Forecasting Lab, that performs research on foundational models for time series forecasting, imputation, classification, and anomaly detection using HPC.
IHPC community building and events
The above paragraph provided a short summary of SDLs and experts in Iceland, but at the time of writing, other HPC and AI experts have already joined the HPC community actions, striving to build another IHPC lab in various scientific and engineering application domains. Advancing stepwise from a simple mailing list of interested Icelandic HPC individuals in the past, many IHPC community-building actions have strengthened the community management of funding strategy, governance, community activism, vision, and creativity. For example, the IHPC community offers face-to-face bi-monthly IHPC workshop events at the UICE Science Park Visindagardar located in the Icelandic Innovation Centre, Groska. This vital community HPC building event in Iceland regularly attracts 40-50 Icelandic HPC stakeholders, increasingly growing since 2020, with regular participation of the private sector through startups, SMEs, industry, academics, and the public sector, national funding organisations, and even international ministry representatives. For example, in April 2026, the IHPC community celebrated the 25th IHPC community workshop with presentations from the Ukrainian ministry. But apart from its own community events, the IHPC community also supports various other HPC/AI-related events, such as within the fields of Cybersecurity, supporting Icelandic Data Center Strategies, or ‘Mondays with Matlabs’.
Given the major successes of Iceland in gender equality throughout careers from leadership to technical experts, and in alignment with the global ‘Women in HPC’ efforts, a particular emphasis in Iceland is to support the ‘Women in Tech’ activities through many events (e.g., exploring inclusive AI, breaking BIAS, a hackathon for students in 2024, or the IUPAC’s Global Women’s Breakfast in 2025).
European IHPC community projects
Fig. 2 highlights the importance of European Commission (EC) and EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (JU) projects acquired by members of the IHPC community over the last ~10 years. Many of the IHPC community-building activities have been directly or indirectly funded by those projects, including the recruitment of foreign experts and talent to complement Icelandic expertise in various important HPC, quantum, and AI-related science and engineering domains.
While each of the projects in Fig. 2 made key contributions to the success of the IHPC community-building effort over the last decade, this paragraph will highlight only a few major projects during that time. Despite quite a few EC projects before 2017, a particular entry into the international HPC community efforts on Modular Supercomputing Architectures (MSA) and its applications was provided to Iceland through participation in the Dynamical Exascale Entry Platform – Extreme Scale Technologies (DEEP-EST) project, becoming an important partner for HPC-driven scalable AI in Earth sciences, thus being part of the larger set of DEEP projects. Today, the Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research (JUPITER), Europe’s first Exascale HPC system, is building on this innovative MSA architecture. Still highly relevant for HPC researchers, the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) – Nordic project enabled Icelandic researchers to advance in sharing datasets, in line with the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles.
One major contribution to the IHPC community’s sustained activities was Iceland’s participation in the EuroHPC JU in 2020, which enabled Icelandic HPC users to access European-wide HPC resources. As shown in Fig. 2, one of the first actions of EuroHPC was to establish so-called National Competence Centres (NCCs) in most participating states of the EuroHPC JU and to support the IHPC community through an NCC in Iceland, as part of the EuroCC project series. As shown in Fig. 2, this movement has led to substantial improvements in the European EU project ecosystem in fields directly or indirectly related to HPC and AI. For example, Icelandic HPC/AI researchers have been instrumental in the Horizon 2020 project Research on AI- and Simulation-Based Engineering at Exascale (CoE RAISE). UICE was a major contributor to this project through the research of Interaction Rooms and the co-design on the Unique AI Framework (UAIF) and its Load AI Modules, Environments & Containers (LAMEC), which is still used in daily HPC operations with HPC users today. With the backbone of the EuroCC project series and the continued success of HPC applications at CoE RAISE, Iceland secured the European Digital Innovation Hub of Iceland (EDIH-IS). That project enabled even closer contact with HPC users, practitioners, and experts from the private and public sectors, well beyond the academic domains known to leverage HPC/AI at scale, including the access to finance (e.g., Icelandic venture capitalists, etc.), and protecting Intellectual Property (IP) rights. Being closer to industry, the IHPC community managed to secure the European Horizon Europe TrustLLM project, contributing NLP/LLM experts, aligning with European values, and partnering with an Icelandic SME called Mideind.
HPC/AI services and training for Iceland
As shown in Fig. 2, three parallel HPC/AI initiatives started operating in 2026, funded by the EC and the EuroHPC EU initiatives, providing Iceland and its collaborators with unprecedented opportunities to leverage HPC, quantum computing, and AI at scale.
The IHPC community was successful in securing the AI Factory Antenna of Iceland (AIFA-ICE), branded in Iceland as Glod, which offers a wide variety of HPC/AI services and training for startups, SMEs, and the public sector, primarily for pre-competitive Research and Development (R&D). That initiative is complemented by the EDIH-IS 2.0, branded in Iceland as Kveikja, which is a much broader EC project initiative linking to a wide network of EDIHs in Europe, providing access to finance, and enabling the IHPC community to consult on the whole end-to-end computing continuum, including Icelandic data centres and cloud providers beyond EuroHPC resources, including support for financing actions (e.g., access to venture capitalists, national grants, IP and patents, etc.). Also, the EuroCC3 project has started to complement the AI-driven HPC activities in Glod and Kveikja with more traditional HPC physics-based methods, algorithms, and activities using often numerical methods based on known physical laws. Some AI/HPC training materials are publicly available and often used by IHPC community members, such as those offered by UICE on YouTube from the yearly UICE HPC Course. Over the last decade, Iceland has gained considerable strength in the European ecosystem and has delivered exceptional HPC/AI services to startups, SMEs, and PSOs, as evidenced by testimonials on the IHPC committee Web page. One private sector example of the HPC power user is SME GreenFish mentioned in the EuroCC2 success stories booklet which, in turn, is a great resource for showcasing that AI/HPC is used across a wide variety of business sectors today. SME Treble is another Icelandic HPC power user. One public sector example is the PSO Statistics Iceland, which has worked with the IHPC community in recent years to prepare, perform, and evaluate Joint Hackathons in 2024 and 2025, and more events are committed from 2026 to 2028 in close collaboration with several Icelandic ministries.
Invitation to collaborate with the IHPC community
Iceland has a long tradition of collaborating closely with international partners. A regional example is the many facets of Nordic collaboration, such as co-organising the 2025 Nordic HPC Summit, engaging in Quantum Computing together via NordForsk, and building opportunities through the NewNordics. However, Iceland also collaborates intensively with other European countries, such as Germany via the Juelich Supercomputing Center (JSC) hosting JUPITER, Hungary, Cyprus, and many others. Please contact the IHPC community via the IHPC community Web page to connect with our experts, or if you require access to HPC and quantum computing resources.
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This article will feature in our upcoming HPC Special Focus Publication.
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