The High-Performance Computing Center of the University of Stuttgart (HLRS) and artificial intelligence startup Seedbox Ventures GmbH today announced that they have signed a long-term cooperation agreement. In addition to creating large language models and conducting research on efficient, scalable training algorithms and infrastructures, the partners will develop a secure and cost-efficient service for the provision, use, and quality management of customized AI models in Germany.
Aug 06, 2024
Announcements
HPC in Industry
AI & Data Analytics
SMEs
Partnerships
See all news
An AI consultancy based in Stuttgart, Seedbox will use HLRS’s supercomputing systems to develop innovative AI solutions for German companies, including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Seedbox and HLRS will also work together to plan a service package that supports companies in easily and effectively using the formidable supercomputing infrastructures available in the State of Baden-Württemberg. The collaboration represents an important step towards a strategic alignment and operationalization of AI in Europe, and holds the potential to contribute significantly to the growth of a globally competitive, innovative European AI ecosystem.
In addition, Seedbox will use HLRS’s Hawk supercomputer and the center’s future high-performance computing (HPC) systems to train specialized, powerful, multilingual language models of various sizes. They will also make these language models available to the larger AI community on an open source basis. The resulting knowledge should demonstrate how domain-specific AI models can be set up, operated, and scaled on local HPC environments in a cost- and energy-efficient manner.
“In many companies today, artificial intelligence has already become synonymous with innovation,” says Kai Kölsch, co-founder and Managing Director of Seedbox. “Using generative AI, we are now able to achieve significant efficiencies in core business activities and to tap into additional, sustainable sources of revenue by developing new business models. With the help of HLRS and access to its supercomputing infrastructure, we will support companies across Germany in taking their innovation projects to the next level.”
Generative artificial intelligence has been exploding since the arrival of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. In industry, LLMs can be used, for example, to create co-pilots and chatbots, for document processing and management, to analyze complex data sources, or to create editorial content. Such tools could also significantly reduce the time spent on structured, data-driven, or repetitive tasks, enabling major increases in efficiency at a time when many companies are suffering from staff shortages. The integration of AI will become even more relevant when used in existing and new systems, such as interfaces for customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP), knowledge databases, or as an integral component of new, innovative software solutions.
Interest in generative AI is growing rapidly among German SMEs, but more speed is needed in the implementation of practical applications. Doing so will require solutions that reliably tackle challenges such as data security, data sovereignty, performance, and cost efficiency. One additional important factor is that the most widely used LLMs have been trained using English-language texts and are operated by companies based outside the European Union. The ability to use local infrastructure to store and process local, critical proprietary data in a secure way is therefore essential from both business and strategic points of view.
Among other goals, the collaboration between Seedbox and HLRS aims to solve these challenges and to enable German industry to utilize the full potential of large language models. Dennis Hoppe, head of the HLRS Department of Converged Computing, welcomed the new partnership with Seedbox, saying, “In recent years, HLRS has been continually expanding its ability to support machine learning and artificial intelligence. Through our collaboration with Seedbox, we look forward to gaining valuable experience with LLMs and generative AI, particularly as the partnership will also contribute to HLRS’s mission of sustainably supporting German industry.”
Training algorithms for machine learning require large-scale computing performance. The collaboration between Seedbox and HLRS is based on the massive computing capabilities of the Hawk supercomputer, one of the most powerful systems for high-performance computing in Europe. The system was built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and offers a peak performance of approximately 26 petaFLOPS (26 quadrillion calculations per second). With 192 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs interconnected with NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking, it also offers AI performance of approximately 120 petaFLOPS, making it ideal for deep learning applications. HLRS's next-generation supercomputer — named Hunter — will further increase the center’s AI capacity beginning in the first half of 2025.
This collaboration agreement marks the first time that HLRS has entered into a partnership with an AI startup. As HLRS Managing Director Dr. Bastian Koller explains, the collaboration is an important step in the high-performance computing center’s strategy: “With Seedbox as a strategic partner, we can not only already show what is possible with our current system but also what will be possible with our future systems, Hunter and Herder. This way, we will lose no time in the race to develop the best possible uses of AI for science and industry.”
The collaboration offers many advantages for German industry and will contribute to improving the country’s digital independence. Companies will benefit from software that runs on the most modern and powerful hardware without having to invest in building and operating their own large data centers. When developing and using AI applications based on proprietary or personal data, hosting data in a local, secure, public data center will also pose much less risk than uploading data to the cloud. As one of Germany’s three publicly financed national high-performance computing centers, HLRS follows the highest possible security standards. This is ensured through its certification according to the ISO 27001 norm for information security management.
Dennis Dickmann, who has worked intensively in the field of artificial intelligence since 2008 and is responsible for technology development at Seedbox as its co-founder and CTO, sees this as a major advantage for German companies: “Such a powerful, secure and regional supercomputing infrastructure is a unique and extremely valuable resource. By cooperating with HLRS, we can guarantee the security of our clients’ data and provide them with the AI technologies they need to remain innovative and competitive."
— Christopher Williams
Funding for Hawk and HLRS's future systems, Hunter and Herder, is provided by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry for Science, Research, and the Arts and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research through the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS).
