Denmark launches first AI supercomputer

Denmark unveiled its first AI supercomputer this week, named Gefion after a goddess in Danish mythology.

It is one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, running on state-of-the-art processors and software by California-based technology company NVIDIA and supported by the Danish non-profit Novo Nordisk Foundation.

Housed in Denmark’s new Center for AI Innovation (DCAI), a company funded by Novo Nordisk Foundation, the world’s wealthiest charitable foundation, and the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO), Gefion will be aimed at achieving “breakthroughs in quantum computing, clean energy, biotechnology and other areas serving Danish society and the world”, said NVIDIA in a press release.

The new AI supercomputer was inaugurated at a ceremony in Copenhagen on Wednesday, where it was symbolically turned on by King Frederik X of Denmark, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huange and CEO of DCAI Nadia Carlsten.

During the event, Carlsten – an industry leader in quantum computing – sat down with Jensen to discuss this public-private initiative to build one of the world’s fastest AI supercomputers in Denmark, and how it will serve industry, startups and academia.

“Gefion is going to be a factory of intelligence. This is a new industry that never existed before. It sits on top of the IT industry. We’re inventing something fundamentally new,” Jensen said.

The launch of Gefion is an important milestone for Denmark in establishing its own sovereign AI. 

Sovereign AI can be achieved when a nation has the capacity to produce artificial intelligence with its own data, workforce, infrastructure and business networks. Having a supercomputer on national soil provides a foundation for countries to use their own infrastructure as they build AI models and applications that reflect their unique culture and language.

“What country can afford not to have this infrastructure, just as every country realizes you have communications, transportation, healthcare, fundamental infrastructures — the fundamental infrastructure of any country surely must be the manufacturer of intelligence,” said Jensen.

“For Denmark to be one of the handful of countries in the world that has now initiated on this vision is really incredible.”

Carlsten said it is a “remarkable achievement” that it took only six months from the supercomputer’s initial announcement to its completion and readiness for customer testing, and called it “the game-changer that many innovators had been waiting for”.

The new supercomputer is expected to address global challenges with insights into infectious disease, climate change and food security. Gefion is now being prepared for users, and a pilot phase will begin to bring in projects that seek to use AI to accelerate progress, including in such areas as quantum computing, drug discovery and energy efficiency, writes NVIDIA.

Jensen said that he anticipated the era of computer-aided drug discovery within this decade: “I’m hoping that what the computer did to the technology industry, it will do for digital biology,” he said.

Denmark’s Minister for Industry, Business, and Financial Affairs Morten Bødskov called the supercomputer “groundbreaking” and spoke of the competitive advantage that Gefion would bring to Denmark:

“Gefion provides our Danish enterprises with entirely new opportunities. [It] will drive the advancement of the green transition, enable tailor-made solutions, and strengthen the competitive standing of our companies in the global market. In a time of heightened international competition, this supercomputer acts as a vital enabler for advancing Danish businesses into the future,” he said in a Novo Nordisk Foundation press release.

Pilot project applications of Gefion
One of the participants in the pilot is the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), which says it aims to use the new technology to deliver faster and more accurate weather forecasts.

Forecast times could be cut from hours to minutes, while greatly reducing the energy footprint required for these forecasts when compared with traditional methods, said NVIDIA.

At the University of Copenhagen, researchers will use Gefion to conduct a large-scale simulation of quantum computer circuits.

Gefion will enable the simulated system to “increase from 36 to 40 entangled qubits, which brings it close to what’s known as ‘quantum supremacy’, or essentially outperforming a traditional computer while using less resources”, said NVIDIA.

A little background: the brain of a supercomputer is made up of memory devices called qubits.

While an ordinary bit can store data in a state of either 1 or 0, a qubit can reside in both states simultaneously – known as quantum superposition.

Until now, researchers have managed to build small circuits, in which only one qubit can be operated at once. So it will be a global milestone to simultaneously operate and measure multiple ‘spin qubits’ on the same quantum chip.

In 2021, Professor Federico Fedele and Assistant Professor Anasua Chatterjee at the University of Copenhagen achieved the first instance of this, but Gefion opens new possibilities to scale up this work.

Elsewhere in academic research, a collaboration between the University of Copenhagen, the Technical University of Denmark, Novo Nordisk and Novonesis will use Gefion to establish a compex model for discoveries in disease mutation analysis and vaccine design.

Two startups – transport company Go Autonomous and healthcare company Teton – will use Gefion respectively for an AI model that works across text, layout and image inputs, and for creating an ‘AI Care Companion’ with large video pretraining, said NVIDIA.

The Gefion supercomputer and ongoing collaborations with NVIDIA will position Denmark, with its renowned research community, to pursue the world’s leading scientific challenges with enormous social impact as well as large-scale projects across industries.

Powered by renewable energy
Global data centre provider Digital Realty hosts the supercomputer in one of its AI-ready data centre facilities in Denmark, which runs on 100 percent renewable energy,according to Novo Nordisk.

Eviden, a European leader in high-performance computing (HPC), assembled and installed the computer.

The Novo Nordisk Foundation announced that it has committed approximately DKK 600 million towards the initial costs of the centre, while EIFO has contributed DKK 100 million and owns a minority stake of 15 percent in the company.

CEO of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen called Gefion “a milestone”, and said that public-private initiatives are the way forward in solving global issues.

“In the future, we must cooperate even more with exceptional partners from all over the world if we are to solve the enormous challenges facing not only our own countries but the planet,” he said.