On October 10-11 2022, ENCCS organised Industry Days 2022. A large number of participants from the Swedish industrial sector and public administration joined the conference. Large Swedish companies like NorthVolt, Ericsson, AstraZenaca, Scania, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) like Erco Pharma, Compular, AirinNova, Thermo-Calc Software, Icarus Digital Math, organisations like RISE, Vinnova, Swedish research council, National Archives and national Library discussed both their success stories, as well as challenges and everyday problems they face while using supercomputers. At the event there were also international guests form USA, Norway, Finland and Germany.
Apart from the regular talks given, there were also panel discussions led by Jeanette Nilsson, AI ecosystem driver at RISE and Lilit Axner, ENCCS director, regarding strategy, insights, and the needs of the private and public sector for computing power.
You can watch most of the talks on this playlist https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2GgjY1xUzfBC_ZZtMo_1fpZBqFXXFLiV, or read the summaries below and click on each presenter to go the individual video.
EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) general director Anders Dam Jensen presented an extremely helpful summary of the European HPC strategy and the current EuroHPC JU supercomputers, as well as the ones that will be operational in the near future (Leonardo in Italy, Deucalion in Portugal, MareNostrum 5 in Spain)).
ENCCS director Lilit Axner summarised the work and success stories that ENCCS achieved, assisting more than 23 companies and institutions with training and access to EuroHPC JU supercomputers during the past two years since ENCCS was established.
Jeannette Spulher, the National Contact Person for Horizon Europe – Digital, Industry and
Space at Vinnova touched upon the factors that make Sweden and attractive destination for investments and innovation.
Brendan McGinty, NCSA Director of Industry in Illinois, USA, gave his insights on what is needed to reach out and collaborate with the private sector and introduced to the business models they use.
Magnus Friberg, Senior Adviser at the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) briefly explained the Swedish participation in the European High-Performance Computing (HPC) ecosystem through the work and representation at the EuroHPC JU.
Martin Körling, data systems expert at RISE (Research Institutes of Sweden) talked about HPC as a cloud service and where European supercomputers stand in the cloud service industry.
Large industry section
Roger Kvam and Kalle Kantola presented their work on the Norwegian and Finnish competence centres and their collaborative industrial projects.
As part of the large industry, Matteo Ambrosetti, advanced material engineer at Northvolt talked about Northvolt’s use of supercomputers and their recent access on EuroHPC JU VEGA system at Slovenia for simulating the battery’s molecular structures. Mattias Chevalier, expert engineer at Scania presented Scania’s long collaboration with PDC, HPC centre at the Royal Institute of Technology and their strategy shift from manufacturing towards transport solutions.
SME Section
Emil Krutmeijer and Fabian Årén from Compular AB described their experience in improving battery material design using molecular simulations. With the assistance of ENCCS, Compular AB was awarded computing time on EuroHPC JU’s supercomputer Karolina as well as 250 000€ experiment grant through the FF4EuroHPC project call.
Magnus Lundborg, CSO of ERCO Pharma AB shared their work on skin permeability which has a profound impact on drug absorption in the human body. ERCO Pharma was recently awarded 3.9 million GPU core hours in VEGA through the regular access EuroHPC JU call thanks to the help of ENCCS.
Jon Paul Janet, associate principal scientist, molecular AI from AstraZeneca AB talked about accelerated drug design by combining AI techniques and simulations.
Johan Eker and Achref Rabhi gave a useful point of view of Ericsson AB regarding 5G, 6G and digital twins of cities for simulating network signals.
Mengmeng Zhang, CEO of Airinnova AB and Johan Jansson, CEO of Icarus Digital Math talked about their CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) work.
Icarus Digital Math focused on their breakthrough simulation technology which is used for design of electric aircraft and the Formula 1 industry.
Public Administration Section
Love Börjeson, director of KBLab at the National Library of Sweden (KB) went through their work on Natural Language Processing (NLP) by using machine learning algorithms on their enormous text, audio and video archives. KB is the recipient of 10 000 000 GPU core hours through the EuroHPC JU regular access call.
Erik Lenas, data scientist at Riksarkivet (Swedish National Archives) explained their CRNN (Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network) workflow of millions of scanned archival documents to turn them into searchable text using VEGA supercomputer in Slovenia. Their workflow has allegedly saved about €700 000 in labour costs.
Magnus Sahlgren from AI Sweden described in detail the Swedish language models and their experience with the Berzelius supercomputer in Linköping University and their recent access to VEGA in Slovenia.
Göran Wendin, professor at Chalmers University of Technology as well as the project manager of NordicQuest project introduced Quantum Computing and the its future in Europe.
The slides of the talks can be found below.
Day 1
- Lilit Axner – ENCCS
- Jeannette Spuhler – Vinnova – Innovate Sweden
- Anders Dam Jensen – EuroHPC JU – The European Approach to the Exascale Challenge
- Brendan McGinty – NCSA – Industry Overview and Best Practices
- Roger Kvam-Norwegian Research Infrastructure Services (NRIS)
- Kalle Kantola-VTT Finland – Approaches for accelerating HPC impact in industry
- Matteo Ambrosetti – Northvolt AB – Multiscale Methodologies for Electrolyte Characterization
- Emil Krutmeijer – Compular AB – Innovative analysis software improving battery materials development
- Magnus Lundborg – ERCO Pharma – Predicting Skin Permeability Using Molecular Dynamics Simulations
- Love Börjeson – National Library of Sweden – Leveraging the collections of cultural heritage institutions using HPC
Day 2
- Magnus Friberg – Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) – The Swedish EuroHPC organization and how to get involved
- Martin Körling – RISE – HPC as a Service
- Erik Lenas – Swedish National Archives (Riksarkivet) – ENCCS and Vega in Support of Large-Scale Digitization of Archival Materials
- Magnus Sahlgren – AI Sweden – GPT-SW3: a foundational resource for Swedish NLP
- Göran Wendin – Chalmers University – HPC+QC, NordIQuEst and the Future of Quantum Computing
- Jon Paul Janet – AstraZeneca – Accelerating drug design with AI & simulation
- Johan Eker – Achref Rabhi – Ericsson – Large scale computations for 5G &6G
