Gefion Enables the Visionary Ambition of AI Moonshots
Gefion plays a pivotal role in realizing the vision of the Pioneer Centre for AI (P1), positioning Denmark at the forefront of fundamental AI research.
The strategic partnership between P1 and the Danish Centre for AI Innovation (DCAI), provides the necessary resources to support an ambitious research agenda, fueling the next generation of breakthroughs in ethical and responsible manners. By providing essential access to GPUs and high-performance compute power, Gefion enables researchers to conduct large-scale projects, leveraging the infrastructure for AI research in Denmark.
As Nadia Carlsten, CEO of DCAI notes:
"By connecting Gefion’s raw computational power with the Pioneer Centre’s visionary AI research, we’re creating a launchpad for global innovation that puts Denmark at the forefront of human-centric AI."
Through pilot projects and continuous refinement of technical requirements, the collaboration ensures that the system remains aligned with the needs of researchers. Representing five universities, P1 provided a unique opportunity to unify these across institutions, in which P1 Co-Lead, Professor Mads Nielsen, has been involved from the beginning.
As Professor Mads Nielsen emphasizes, “We need three essential ingredients for scientific discovery within AI: talent, data, and compute power. Gefion is the third leg, ensuring all three are fulfilled.”
The collaboration between P1 and Gefion, enables the entire Danish AI research ecosystem to operate at a new level, and enhances Denmark’s ability to attract top international talent and grow its AI research capacity, clearly signaling a national commitment to excellence. With access to Gefion, researchers can run large-scale datasets, conduct large model training, and analyze multimodal inputs at scale, all within the country's borders ensuring compliance for handling sensitive data.
As elaborated by P1 Director, Professor Serge Belongie: "Since the first glimmers of a Danish supercomputer plan began to appear, I have consistently been impressed by NNF and DCAI's attentiveness to the needs of Denmark's Machine Learning research community. Compared to many other customers, we are an odd bunch: we need to run exploratory experiments based on hunches, perform wild parameter sweeps, and generally poke around to find out exactly what it is that we need to do.”
He continues, “I'm delighted to see DCAI's responsiveness to these needs, complemented by NNF's generous Gefion grant program for academic research. As one example of a project for which we will submit a proposal, my group has been exploring geospatial representation learning on multimodal Earth Observation data. We have completed preliminary studies that are highly promising using small-scale compute, targeting tasks such as mapping carbon stocks or species abundance. Gefion provides us a path to scale this effort by orders of magnitude, with downstream impact in tasks including crop type, landcover, and climate zone classification at a global scale."
The strategic partnership between P1 and DCAI holds the potential to significantly accelerate Denmark’s national research capabilities - a potential that is already being actively realized.