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Our twin prop plane lands with a bump and a shake in a remote part of Finland.
Our bus from the airport to the hotel drives us through empty streets carved out through a misty forest.
Dr. Pekka Mannninen and Eeva Sokka admiring LUMI
Inside, the decor is dated and very brown.
Outside,steamis spookily rising off the ground.
It is eerie and not what I expected visiting a place at the forefront of technology.
So, why here?
The town is also a hub in a communication online grid connecting the Nordic countries.
So, all in all, its a perfect place to build a computing behemoth.
Much like most places in Kajaani, the supercomputer is only a short distance from the hotel.
Upon arrival we were given visitor cards and told what we could, and could not photograph.
LUMI is located inside what used to be a papermill, which I find quite poetic.
Dr. Pekka Mannninen and Eeva Sokka admiring LUMI
We are led through a non-descript door, up some stairs, and onto a mezzanine floor.
I make my way over to the edge and there, below me, is LUMI.
On the upper floor sits the brains - racks filled with AMD CPUs and GPUs.
The decision to host the system in Kajaani was made in June 2019.
After planning, it then took nine months to procure everything needed and by March 2021 everything was ready.
One of the novel approaches to Climate DT is that it can stream climate model output to impact models.
The irony of my CO2 emissions required to visit LUMI is also not lost on me.
“The CO2 emissions should be the headache of the HPC facility, not the end user.”
LUMI resource are divided between national resources and a European-wide EuroHPC quota, with half going to each entity.
The massive scale of LUMI enables more parallel experiments providing faster scientific discovery and R&D.
Katja Mankinen,a data scientist at CSC, tells me it’s as simple putting in a request.
I asked more about what the challenges are outside of compute when you get to use LUMI.
Its needed for doing this ground breaking research but data is one of the limiting factors.
Data is a limiting factor
After speaking to Dr Mankinen, I askedDr.
“Right now we are studying AI ethics and what it means for our customers,” he said.
“There are quite a lot of responsibilities depending on your use case and whether you have higher risks.
Some can be quite hard to manage.
You want to be careful what youre putting intoChatGPTfor example, it could be secret.
Finding a balance is difficult.”
“We are making the best effort and trying to justify interpretations.
If they change it, then we will change it.”
Diminishing returns
It’s not just data that is a limiting factor when it comes to results.
Trying to amalgamate data from so many GPUs is a challenge.
Compared with having 10,000 users at one data center, having one user for 10,000 GPUs is more problematic.
We have got to the end of that line of just pushing more and more parameters into a model.
Removing the bottleneck in software will also mitigate the diminishing returns we’re seeing in compute.
The interviews are winding up and the coffee cups are making their way to the sink.
Just in front of the dam sits an old castle ruin that began construction in 1604.
It’s beautiful, other than the ugly road that runs through the center of it.
Why couldn’t they have built the road just a short distance away?
For the sake of progress and convenience a piece of history was sullied.
The people who built the first bridge in 1845 probably didn’t appreciate the castle at the time.
The bridge is a reminder to carefully consider what the impact of advancement can have.
“All AI systems should have a purpose.
Why is the system being set up?
For ChatGPT, what is the purpose?
It could be anything?
Thats why I see AI becoming a lot more focused and then we wont have so many ethical issues.
There is a lot of sensationalism about what the future holds with AI on the horizon.
Talking to the scientists working at LUMI gives me a feeling of confidence that we will.
