Computing
Compute Facilities
At the Pioneer Centre AI, we have prioritized minimizing day-to-day friction for our researchers. The centre is investing heavily in two compute installations set for continual expansion. Both installations are tailor-made for AI workloads, allowing our researchers to take their code from conception to being ready for final training at larger facilities in a nurturing environment with room for experimenting, making mistakes and growing. Researchers also have the option to bring their own compute budgets to add to the resources within the Pioneer Centre for AI’s facilities.
The P1-Cluster housed at The Technical University of Denmark (DTU)
Available exclusively for P1-research staff and affiliates, the P1-Cluster is dedicated HPC with support provided by the centre’s Compute Support group and the P1-Compute Coordinator, under the supervision of the DTU Computing Center hpc.dtu.dk.
The GDPR-compliant P1-Cluster at NGC
One of these facilities will be for GDPR-compliant computing, allowing the centre’s researchers access to highly restricted data. Facilities will be available to all researchers affiliated with the Pioneer Centre. The National Genome Centre (NGC) will manage the P1-Cluster. Testing of the new cluster will take place in Q3 2024 and should be ready for the community in Q4 2024.
National resources
Each of the centre’s partner universities provides staff and students with HPC.
In addition, facilities are available through DEIC.
In April 2024, the Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF) announced a new, multi-million kroner investment in collaboration with NVIDIA, establishing a national centre for AI innovation that will house one of the world’s most powerful AI supercomputers (see press release, here). P1 researchers have been instrumental in helping to design this new resource, called Gefion.
European resources
Knowledge Sharing
To help users and staff share and disseminate information across universities, the centre has an internal documentation system featuring information such as computing workflows, where and how to get compute hours at larger facilities, how to use the compute facilities, as well as educational material about technical topics. The Pioneer Centre for AI hosts intro talks from experts on topics such as GPUs, HPC systems and graph-based computing systems, with active participation and discussion being particularly welcome. Frequently, researchers from universities across the globe will give talks about their research.
Dedicated Personnel
To make sure our researchers have potential obstructions removed from reaching their goals, the Pioneer Centre for AI provides dedicated computing personnel who help with:
- Sparring about code
- Advice about where and how to run code
- Assistance in finding compute hours at bigger facilities
- Suggestions for how to solve errors
- Custom low-level code written
- Advice on how to spend computing budget
The P1-Compute Coordinator position is currently under recruitment.
