While the Earth has remained at roughly the same size for the past four-and-a-half billion years, the world itself has never been smaller than it is today. That’s because technical advancements in communication, computing, transportation and other industries have effectively consolidated society into a singular global community.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Europe, which is a cosmopolitan confluence of cultures, languages and backgrounds unlike any other.  Slovakia now sits as the hearth of this region, unifying Europe by bridging language divide through the development of the world’s fastest and most-powerful AI supercomputer.

By building IT and supercomputer capabilities in Slovakia, we are capitalizing on a once-in-a-decade opportunity to lead AI initiatives around the globe. We are also addressing the need for Slovakia to move from a manufacturing-based economy to an economy based on high value, knowledge-based industry 4.0. It will help change Slovakia’s “brain drain” to a “brain gain”, because the most talented Slovakians will be motivated and have the opportunity to stay in the country, as opposed to taking high tech jobs abroad. Building the world’s fastest AI supercomputer in Slovakia will foster new high-tech industry and thrust Slovakia into the mainstream of the worldwide race to capitalize on the rapidly growing AI market. It will motivate scientists from around the world to come to Slovakia to conduct groundbreaking research, because nobody else will have a non-military machine capable of that performance.

AI has the potential to make a huge impact on humanity and provide a greener future by enabling faster drug and vaccine discovery, personalizing medicine, assessing climate change impacts, designing low-emission engines and planning for renewable energy with the world’s fastest AI supercomputer, Slovakia will enable the world’s scientists to develop a greater understanding of the root causes, and the most effective mitigation strategies, in our fight against climate change.

The EU consumes 30 percent of the world’s compute resources but only has 5 percent of its installed capacity.  Innovations for Digital Infrastructure (I4DI), a partnership of innovative global technology leaders that are developing European-based supercomputing solutions to advance the region’s capabilities in solving the performance, power and efficiency issues challenging the industry today, is actively working to build a modern, cost-effective cloud infrastructure in Slovakia to support the latest industry trends throughout the region.

I4DI provides freedom and openness similar to Open Compute to the European HPC market. The consortium brings together companies in storage, networking, rack manufacturing, power, software, services and telecommunications spaces to help transform the entire EU region from an importer of data center and supercomputer technologies to an innovative leader in research for worldwide AI and HPC solutions. These efforts are being built around the world’s first Universal Processor for servers/AI/HPC to enable data centers to exceed the capacity of the human brain while drastically lowering power consumption and costs.

That Universal Processor, Tachyum's Prodigy, can run HPC applications, convolutional AI, explainable AI, general AI, bio AI, and spiking neural networks, plus normal data center workloads, on a single homogeneous processor platform using existing and standard programming models. Without Prodigy, data center customers must use a combination of CPUs, GPUs, TPUs and other accelerators for these different workloads, creating inefficiency, expense, and the complexity of maintaining separate hardware infrastructures. Using specific hardware dedicated to each type of workload (e.g. data center, AI, HPC), results in the significant underutilization of hardware resources, and more challenging programming, support and maintenance environments. Prodigy’s ability to seamlessly switch among these various workloads dramatically changes the competitive landscape and drastically improves data center economics.

So, while the physical characteristics of Earth remain largely unchanged, the planet’s physical infrastructure, driven by modern data centers, continues to get smaller.  Find out more about how Tachyum and its partners in the I4DI are working to develop a powerful AI supercomputer and make Slovakia the central hub of an interconnected technology universe during the presentation of Dr. Rado Danilak at Spring ITAPA.