Towards digital 2030s with competence development and investments in supercomputers – CSC’s comments on the second draft of the national Digital Compass

Towards digital 2030s with competence development and investments in supercomputers – CSC’s comments on the second draft of the national Digital Compass

CSC appreciates the ambitious and more strategic approach of the new draft of the national digital compass and sees the plan to publish the digital compass as a government white paper as a good way to increase the political weight of the issue and to establish a parliamentary base for continuity from one electoral mandate to the next. We also hope to see stakeholder involvement in the monitoring of the Compass and the planning of implementation measures, as well as a plan on how international projects will be made use of to achieve national objectives.

The objectives targeting skills should pay attention to the continuous need to update curricula and competences of teachers. Furthermore, the key result of the Compass that mentions LUMI should indicate more clearly that a new next generation supercomputer to replace the current one is being sought after, and it should take into account the opportunities that LUMI provides for different fields of academic research and industry.

As for digital infrastructure, we put emphasis on promoting data sharing on the basis of the European Interoperability Framework and FAIR principles. In addition, we hope that digital infrastructure will be developed as an interoperable ecosystem. The environmental and energy efficiency dimension of the Compass should also be strengthened while profiling Finland as an energy, eco and cost-effective location for data centres and promoting the unique, national climate and environment strategy for the ICT sector. Our already advanced developments in High-Performance Computing and quantum technology should also be kept up in the future.

Read the full statement here (in Finnish)