EU to expand AI startups’ access to its supercomputers

But one early learning is the program needs to bake in dedicated support for AI startups to train them on how to get the most out of the European Union’s high performance computing

A European Union (EU) plan to support homegrown AI startups by providing them with access to processing power for model training on the bloc’s supercomputers, which was announced back in September and began last month, has seen France’s Mistral AI participate in an early pilot phase, as per an update from the EU.

But one early learning is the program needs to bake in dedicated support for artificial intelligence startups to train them on how to get the most out of the European Union’s high performance computing.

One of the things that we have seen is the need, not only to provide access but, to provide facility — particularly skills, knowledge and experience that we have in the hosting centers — on how this access can be not only facilitated but to develop training algorithms that are using the best of the architecture and the computing power that is available right now in each supercomputing center and in our machines, said an European Union official during a press briefing today.

The plan is for “centers of excellence” to be set up to support the development of dedicated artificial intelligence algorithms that can run on the European Union’s supercomputers, they said.

AI startups are more likely to be accustomed to using dedicated computer hardware provided by U.S. hyperscalers to train their models than tapping the processing power offered by supercomputers as a training resource.

So the high-performance computing access for artificial intelligence training program is being augmented with a support wrapper, as per European Union officials who were speaking on background ahead of the official inauguration for MareNostrum 5, a pre-exascale supercomputer that will be inaugurated Thursday at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain.

We are developing facilities for our Small and medium-sized enterprises to be able to understand how to best use the supercomputers and how to access the supercomputers and how to parallelize their algorithms in the case of artificial intelligence to be able to develop their models, said a Commission official. As of 2024, we expect much more of these kinds of approaches than we have right now.

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