Image
NCC Finland
NCC Finland is part of the EuroCC2 project, which establishes national HPC competence centers in different European countries. NCC Finland's mission is to support and improve the capabilities of Finnish business users to utilize the opportunities of high- performance computing, data analytics and artificial intelligence.Through EuroCC Finland, companies have access to the computing capacity of the EuroHPC LUMI Supercomputer. EuroCC Finland is operated by the CSC – IT Center for Science.
Industrial organisations involved:
Founded in 2006 as a spin-off from the University of Oulu, Visidon currently employs about 40 professionals specializing in image processing and machine learning. Its main markets today are Asia and the United States.
Visidon develops advanced, optimized software solutions for imaging and video quality enhancement, particularly in embedded electronic systems where computing power is often limited and real-time processing is required. Their technologies leverage AI and machine learning, focusing on visual improvements in image and video quality, better resolution, depth calculation, as well as facial and object recognition and tracking. Visidon’s solutions are well-suited for smartphones, robotics, video conferencing, and surveillance systems. The company’s technology can be found in over one billion mobile devices worldwide
Technical/scientific challenge:
Visidon has its own servers for development work, but sometimes its computing capacity is insufficient. Servers are extremely expensive, and it doesn’t make sense to purchase them just for occasional capacity needs, leaving them idle most of the year.
Solution:
Olli Silvén, an emeritus professor familiar to Visidon from the University of Oulu’s Machine Vision and Signal Analysis Research Center, suggested that Visidon could use the LUMI supercomputer in Kajaani alongside its own servers. Inspired by Silvén’s tip, IT Systems Manager Mika Helistekangas contacted CSC’s Mikko Kerttula. Based on their discussion, a Try & Buy project was set up for Visidon, allowing them to test LUMI free of charge.
After the Try & Buy project ended, Visidon continued using LUMI as a purchased service. They created their own documentation based on LUMI’s materials, making it easy for new employees to use.
“We use LUMI to finalize our products when our own servers are overloaded,” Helistekangas explains. “We do research and training mainly on our own servers because that’s iterative work. Then, when the research is done and the product needs to be finalized and completed, we switch to LUMI.”
LUMI enables parallel training on multiple GPUs, significantly speeding up processes. Training a single model can be 2–4 times faster than on the company’s own servers, and parallelization adds even more power.
Business impact:
According to Visidon, the greatest benefit of using LUMI is that it enables flexible customer service and helps them meet even the tightest deadlines.
“The more you think about it, cameras are everywhere nowadays,” reflects Jenna Enbuska, Visidon’s Marketing Director. “IoT and telecommunications technologies rely on cameras, as do drones and other autonomous vehicles, which are becoming more common and diverse across industries. The importance of image and video quality will only grow in the future. So we see the market outlook as bright and the need for LUMI continuing.”
For European companies, sustainable operations are important, so using the LUMI supercomputer in product development could be a selling point. Located in Kajaani, LUMI is one of the world’s most environmentally friendly supercomputers. It runs entirely on renewable energy, and the waste heat from its data center is used in Kajaani’s district heating network.
“The future looks even brighter knowing that in 2027, LUMI will get an AI-optimized successor, the LUMI-AI supercomputer,” Kerttula adds. “This means that companies’ access to high-performance computing for R&D is secured well into the future.”
Benefits:
- Computing power and scalability to RDI when needed
- Parallelization of training tasks speeding up 2-4 times faster than with normal servers
- Clear documentation
- Cost efficiency
Success story # Highlights:
- Keywords: Parallelisation, Supercomputing, business processes
- Industry Sector Software development for image processing
- Technology EuroHPC LUMI, Machine Learning
Contact:
- Mikko Kerttula, Senior project manager, mikko.kerttula@csc.fi
- Anne Mäntylä, Marketing specialist, anne.mantyla@csc.fi