Last week (Nov 21-22) ENCCS organised the Industry Days 2023 conference. The focus was supercomputing - including exciting applications from multiple Swedish companies and public authorities and the ecosystem of supercomputing services both in Sweden and across Europe.
During the course of the event over 30 companies and public authorities were represented in talks and panel discussions, and over 50 participants participated in total. The format with short talks and panel discussions successfully led to large engagement and interactions between speakers and the audience.
Creating opportunities
During this session Hanifeh Kayyeri from RISE AB, Lilit Axner from EuroHPC JU, Malin Sandström from Vetenskapsrådet, Jeanette Spühler from Vinnova and Jan-Erik Sundgren from NAISS shared their thoughts and answered questions on the availability of supercomputing infrastructure in Sweden for companies and public authorities. They also discussed future plans and European collaboration.
AI meets HPC
Ashwin Mohanan from SMHI, Robin Kurtz from the National Library of Sweden and Martin Körling from evroc held an interesting panel on how supercomputers are used to train AI models. One key topic from the panel discussion revolved around the particular requirements for AI use cases deployed on supercomputers, and what additional services they would like to see from EuroHPC JU and the EuroCC network.
Domain expert infrastructure
Petra Dalunde from RISE AB, Jessika Lindvall from SciLifeLab and Jan-Eric Sundgren from NAISS discussed about the different projects that aim to assist organisations tackle societal problems in the digital era. They discussed in detail about infrastructures for life science, the TEFs (Test Experimental Facilities) in Sweden for manufacturing and smart cities, and of course their common denominator, supercomputing.
Supporting industry and SME
In this session Salla Franzén from Navigareventures, Morgan Eriksson from Linné University and Tobias Edman from RISE AB exchanged views on what support is needed for SMEs. What different initiatives are out there and how Europe can enable growth.
ColonyOS
At the end of the first day Johan Kristiansson from ENCCS gave a demo on the new platform ColonyOS. He showcased how supercomputers can easily be added to any workflow and used together with local or cloud infrastructure. As a highlight of his talk he demonstrated how one can include multiple supercomputers in the same workflow.
Industry and European initiatives for support
At the beginning of the second, and last, day of the event, Marie-Françoise Gerard from Teratec in France gave a comprehensive overview of CASTIEL2 and various services developed to support companies. This was followed by Hamza Qadoumi from Ecobloom, Mattias Chevalier from scania.com and Erik Holmström from Sandvik. They shared the interesting computational problems tackled in their companies and how their computing needs will evolve in coming years. They also hope that the Swedish and European supercomputing ecosystem can support them.
Being from vastly different industries, they discussed about the flexibility needed from the side of the EU to reach different sectors and make supercomputing an easy-to-use tool for change and growth.
HPC Centers of Excellence
The Centres of Excellence (CoE) are another initiative of EuroHPC JU that focus on supercomputing applications on different domains. This includes biomolecular research, computational fluid dynamics, plasma physics and more. Bioexcel, CEEC and Plasma-PEPSC have presented their goals and discussed how they can be of use to academia and industry.
Quantum Computing in Sweden and Europe
Quantum computing is an emergent field that has attracted a lot of attention in the past years. EuroHPC JU has already procured 6 quantum computers and it's one of the competences that ENCCS will be investing in.
Göran Wendin from Chalmers University/WACQT and Jonas Almlöf from Ericsson lead this session. They presented their perspectives on this quantum shift and discussed on the challenges that lie ahead.
Nordic HPC competence centres
While some Nordic countries couldn't make it, Denmark and Finland managed to attend Industry Days 2023. Together with Thor Wikfeldt from ENCCS, Dennis Wollbrink from NCC Denmark and Morten Mathiesen from NCC Finland discussed on future collaborations in competences, training and industry support. There is a large pool of competence in the Nordics and there is a need to bring experts and staff together for more exposure to industrial partners.
Presentations
Do you want to check the slides of the talks? You can find them at the event page below.
