Sweden’s AI Catalyst: 300-Petaflops Supercomputer Fuels Nordic Research

sweden’s-ai-catalyst:-300-petaflops-supercomputer-fuels-nordic-research

A Swedish physician who aided pioneer chemistry 200 decades back just bought a different opportunity to innovate.

A supercomputer officially christened in honor of Jöns Jacob Berzelius aims to create AI as a core technology of the upcoming century.

Berzelius (pronounced behr-zeh-LEE-us) invented chemistry’s shorthand (imagine Htwo) and uncovered a handful of features including silicon. A 300-petaflops process now stands on the Linköping University (LiU) campus, fewer than 70 kilometers from his birthplace in south-central Sweden, like a residing silicon tribute to improvements nonetheless to occur.

“Many towns in Sweden have a sq. or road that bears Berzelius’s identify, but the regular particular person most likely does not know a lot about him,” reported Niclas Andersson, technological director at the National Supercomputer Centre (NSC) at Linköping University, which is residence to the procedure based on the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD.

The BerzeLiUs system will be twice as rapidly as Sweden’s present top laptop and would rank between the major 10 % on the most up-to-date checklist of the world’s Prime500 supercomputers.

An Bold AI Agenda

Andersson and some others hope lots of people today will sense ripples from the ambitious perform prepared for the BerzeLiUs supercomputer. For starters, it may perhaps originally deal with as a lot of as 7 two-year jobs that goal to make leaps forward in places like wi-fi communications, cybersecurity, massive-scale IoT and successful programming.


BerzeLiUs supercomputer in Sweden e
Above and at leading: The BerzeLiUs method. Photos: Thor Balkhed, Linkoping University.

In addition, Swedish researchers can use the system to collaborate with their longstanding exploration colleagues at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) on 6 new endeavours. They incorporate finding new techniques to enhance knowledge analytics with visualization, acquiring far more protected AI algorithms and orchestrating numerous AI products to get the job done as just one to schedule the NTU’s campus bus community.

It is all section of Sweden’s largest non-public study initiative concentrated on AI innovation. Regarded only as WASP, the Wallenberg Synthetic Intelligence, Autonomous Units and Software package Plan is a 15-calendar year effort that is now recruited a college of a lot more than three dozen worldwide scientists and engaged 40 providers.

Backing Science for a Much better Planet

The effort and hard work is spearheaded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Basis, Sweden’s biggest private financier of study. It contributed most of the five.five billion kronor ($650 million) for WASP. In a separate present, the foundation donated 300 million kronor ($36 million) last October to Linköping College to construct and run the BerzeLiUs supercomputer for WASP and other researchers.

WASP hosted a virtual party in December that attracted speakers from Ericsson, IKEA, Volvo and SEB Team, one particular of Sweden’s biggest banks. At the party, the foundation’s vice chair, Marcus Wallenberg — scion of the country’s most effective-known relatives of industrialists — pointed out the collaboration concerning academia and market is vital for exploration that will make a good effects on society. In addition, Wallenberg spoke with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at the inauguration of the BerzeLiUs program (see video underneath).

There is little doubt that, like early improvements in chemistry, AI is turning out to be portion of our day by day lives.

“AI will be just about everywhere, it will get into a lot of sites we can not envision at this point,” explained Andersson, whose 25-year occupation at NSC has been devoted to do the job in large effectiveness computing.

The New Formulation: HPC AI

“HPC typically is typically about simulation and now, with the introduction of AI, simulation gets to be an input to new types of facts analytics that will drive computing to significantly broader use — it is a massive pattern shift,” he stated.

Specially, the BerzeLiUs system will help scientists scale their perform to deal with the larger datasets and products that ability discoveries with AI.


Jöns Jacob Berzelius, Swedish chemistry pioneer
Jöns Jacob Berzelius

“Most people today have been functioning with single equipment that are not as highly effective as DGX units, so our most vital process in the coming years is to help develop algorithms that can scale and there are extremely big difficulties that can use a lot of GPU nodes,” he said.

Inside of the New Device

The BerzeLiUs program consists of 60 NVIDIA DGX A100 methods, connected on a 200 Gbit/next NVIDIA Mellanox InfiniBand HDR network. The identical network hyperlinks the processors to one.5 petabytes of flash memory on four storage servers from DataDirect Networks.

The one InfiniBand community makes certain details will get into the system rapidly, and AI is all about facts. “Buying more storage could be the very first update we will require simply because 60 DGX A100 programs can suck up a lot of knowledge speedy,” Andersson reported.

To get begun swiftly, NSC asked NVIDIA and Atos, who managed the develop and integration, to configure the system’s software. The stack will include the Atos Codex AI Suite as very well as entry to NGC, NVIDIA’s hub for GPU-optimized software program for AI and HPC.

In the end, all the bits and bytes come down to individuals who, like Berzelius, develop advancements that generate culture forward.

“We require lots of new explorers in the universe of AI mainly because it will infiltrate and renovate all disciplines of research,” explained Andersson.

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