LUMI advancing global research collaboration

LUMI supercomputer acts as a central part of seven Finland–Colorado and Finland–Japan research collaboration projects aiming to increase the impact of the LUMI infrastructure and support the internationalization of the Finnish research community.

The projects, supported by CSC – IT Center for Science, bring together Finnish and Coloradan and Finnish and Japanese researchers to address top-level research topics in climate science, clean energy, physics, astronomy, and AI. Common to all projects is utilizing LUMI’s computing resources, which enable the advanced AI training, simulations and models produced.

Finland – Colorado projects

Dr. Tuula Aalto from the Finnish Meteorological Institute’s (FMI) Carbon Cycle group leads one of the selected projects on CO₂ Sources and Sinks. Her team collaborates with a research group from the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) and Colorado State University (CSU). LUMI is used to process satellite data and run the global atmospheric inversions and radiative transfer models.

Professor Antti Karttunen from the School of Chemical Engineering at Aalto University leads a project with the aim of using high-performance computing to accelerate the discovery of materials for clean energy and zero-emission vehicles. His Inorganic Materials Modelling research group works in cooperation with researchers from the Department of Physics, Colorado School of Mines. LUMI will be used for Density Functional Theory calculations, training deep learning models and molecular dynamics simulations.

Dr. Antti Penttilä from the Department of Physics at the University of Helsinki leads a project addressing the multi-scale problem in (computational) light scattering and collaborates with partners in the Space Science Institute in Colorado. LUMI will be used for light scattering simulations.

Professor Christina Williamson and Professor Risto Makkonen from the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) and the Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research at the University of Helsinki (INAR) lead a project on climate modelling aiming to reduce aerosol RF uncertainty in an earth system model. They collaborate with researchers from NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory (CSL) and University of Colorado. LUMI will be used as an emulator for the perturbed parameter ensemble.

Finland – Japan projects

Adjunct Professor Dr. Rupert Gladstone from the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland leads a project aiming to develop an emulator to simulate the behaviour of the Antarctic ice sheet and project its role in global sea level rise during the next two centuries. Dr. Gladstone will collaborate with multiple researchers from different Japanese academic and research institutions to develop and optimize the ice sheet models, which will then be run on LUMI to form the projection.

Professor Samuel Kaski from Aalto University and Professor Antti Honkela from the University of Helsinki, both part of the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI), lead a project looking to create an AI assistant to help develop privacy-preserving versions of deep learning models. The AI assistant will be trained on LUMI and validated with the help of a distributed multi-modal world model simultaneously developed by a research group from Japan’s RIKEN.

Dr. Hanindyo Kuncarayakti from the Stellar Explosions research group at the University of Turku leads a project on supernovae explosions that aims to construct physically realistic, state-of-the-art models of SN explosion and interaction with the surrounding medium. He will collaborate with researchers from Kyoto University, University of Tokyo, and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

Projects last till the autumn 2025

The projects were selected based on two Open Calls for Expressions of Interest and are part of a broader CSC-coordinated project aiming to boost the global impact of the LUMI infrastructure and establish collaboration with Coloradan and Japanese research communities. Two of the projects with Japanese partners started at the beginning of 2023, and the other five with Coloradan and Japanese partners in June 2023. All the projects will last until September 2025.