Swedish HPC Business Day 2021

On the 5th of October, ENCCS, for the first time, organized the Swedish HPC Business Day face to face event in collaboration with its third-party RISE, and PDC. The event was a big success and attracted 16 companies and public organizations. At the event, the participants shared their experiences and wishes of using HPC. They described the advantages of using HPC for their businesses and discussed the hurdles they face connected to the lack of hardware, lack of experience with HPC application software and legal aspects. The attendants were a good mixture of participants who already had a vast experience of using HPC as well as those who would like to use it and are exploring the possibilities. Below we highlight some of the presentations during the event.

Love Börjeson, director of KBLab, the Swedish National Library, presented their work on a new generation of artificial neural network models for language understanding. KBLab’s models serve as a way to transfer the full potential of KB’s collection to the Commons, thereby contributing to the digital transformation of society, and ultimately supporting high-quality research and democratic development. Dr. Börjeson mentioned that to be able to analyze 17 billion parameters for the current model architecture, KBLab need a very large HPC system such as Vega, and the next step of analyzing 175 billion parameters models would be possible only through access to such large systems as the upcoming LUMI system in Finland. KBLab is the first public administration in Europe that successfully applied and received access to the EuroHPC JU systems thus putting Sweden on the front line. Dr. Börjeson expressed his gratitude to ENCCS for proposing and assisting KB-Lab in its successful journey on the Vega system.

However, KB-lab was not the only organization ENCCS assisted in using HPC. Another presenter at the event was NorthVolt AB, currently making amazing progress in environmentally friendly battery production. With The help of ENCCS, NorthVolt AB is the first company accessing the EuroHPC JU systems in Europe to optimize in silico the main components of a cell battery: anode, cathode, electrolyte, and membrane. Matteo Ambrosetti, advanced material engineer at NorthVolt AB, proudly presented the progress they made in their battery research since accessing the Vega system in Slovenia and emphasized the importance and cost efficiency of HPC.

Mattias Chevalier from Scania presented the results of ten fruitful years of collaboration with PDC. Scania has been working with PDC since 2011, which has led to a significant increase in the size and speed of the HPC systems at KTH during that period. Scania highly appreciates the HPC system access at PDC and the support given to them by PDC. It is vital for Scania to have this opportunity to replace many physical experiments with simulations, thus decreasing their research and development costs drastically thanks to HPC.