12 February 2025: The original article omitted to mention the involvement of institutes from other ELIXIR Nodes, notably Spain, Greece, Luxembourg and Italy, in European AI Factories with life science use cases. Further details on the involvement of each country can be found in the EU’s press release.
ELIXIR Finland (CSC - IT Center for Science) has been chosen by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking as one of seven hosts of next EuroHPC supercomputers and AI Factories. The existing LUMI supercomputer will initially be upgraded to meet the needs of AI-related research and innovation, and will be replaced by a new AI-optimised supercomputer in 2027.
The newly-funded network of AI Factories will offer innovators and researchers access to high performance computing resources, training and technical expertise. The Finnish AI Factory will be supported by consortium members Denmark, Estonia, Norway, the Czech Republic and Poland.
Powerful supercomputers are necessary to harness the potential by AI to analyse massive volumes of data across different research disciplines. The LUMI supercomputer has previously been used to model climate change and biodiversity loss using digital twins of the Earth.
The funding of €612 million will facilitate access to LUMI by life science researchers using EuroHPC processes, with LUMI AI providing comprehensive support for users without prior experience in high performance computing. The Life Science Login identity services developed by ELIXIR, along with specialist software tools and workflows executed through authorised application programming interfaces, will streamline the development of new AI algorithms. ELIXIR’s support for open data, such as pathogen data managed by EMBL-EBI, makes key biological datasets accessible in computation.
ELIXIR Finland plays a key role in the ELIXIR Compute Platform, which is a group of experts aiming to build and integrate cloud, compute, storage and access services for the life science research community. The new funding boosts the potential impact of Platform activities and is recognition of ELIXIR as a European leader in life sciences compute services and expertise.
Find out more
LUMI news release
ELIXIR Compute Platform