Lithuania has launched one of the most powerful AI platforms in Central and Eastern Europe, built on the advanced NVIDIA DGX B200 server. Valued at €1 million, the system has been deployed at the Digital Defence Centre of Excellence at VILNIUS TECH University.
The new platform accelerates research and innovation in artificial intelligence, digital defence, and data science. According to university researchers, the infrastructure will help bridge the gap with leading global research centres and enable Lithuanian teams to surpass them in select areas.
In addition to academic use, the platform will be accessible to businesses, providing a high-performance environment for testing, developing, and deploying advanced AI solutions.
The new artificial intelligence (AI) computing platform enables researchers to work tens or even hundreds of times faster than before and to move their ideas from theory to real-world solutions more quickly. Shorter experimentation, simulation and analysis times on large datasets will allow faster prototyping and publication of results.
The platform will be available to the University's scientists, researchers, PhD students, staff, and external partners such as public institutions and businesses. The computing and AI platform is envisaged as a sandbox for collaboration between the university and the private sector, especially those involved in cybersecurity and defence projects.
The University, therefore, invites businesses to develop solutions jointly, use the testbed, and conduct joint research. Companies with valuable data and domain expertise without the infrastructure for AI experiments are welcome.
The latest DGX server model delivered
The platform was designed, delivered and installed for the university by 3RTechnology, the only technology company in Lithuania with NVIDIA Priority Partner status. According to the company's director, Rėdas Šimelis, the project included not only the latest air-cooled DGX server model available today, but also other components such as CPU and GPU servers, data storage, network switches, cooling and power supply systems. The total cost of all the equipment is more than €1 million.
"We designed and prepared the infrastructure to work according to the needs of the university, so that the platform is versatile and can provide different types of resources according to the researcher's tasks during the use of the platform. The NVIDIA DGX B200 server itself weighs more than 130 kg, and more than 180 kg with packing materials, so one of the challenges was transporting it and delivering it safely to the data centre premises", says Šimelis. The implementation of this project shows that Lithuania is keeping pace with global technology trends.
Ambitious plans include an unparalleled solution
Professor Dr Artūras Serackis, Head of the Department of Electronic Systems at VILNIUS TECH, says the newly launched platform delivers capabilities previously beyond reach for university researchers. Tasks that previously required an entire month to train a single AI model can now be completed in under half a day. Moreover, the platform unlocks the ability to develop and train AI models that were previously too large or complex to process.
“This platform enables us to study large language models at an entirely new scale,” says Prof. Serackis. “We can run models with significantly more parameters and specialise them for specific domains, resulting in highly accurate language models capable of delivering comprehensive responses with near-infallible precision.”
Serackis says this opens new business opportunities: “They can now evaluate whether a large language model can be tailored to meet their unique needs, estimate the infrastructure required, and make informed decisions—potentially avoiding costly and unnecessary upfront investments.”
Now the platform is ready for use, and according to project lead Prof. Dalius Matuzevičius, it is not easy to decide where to start with the research, as the range of ideas and projects is vast. "For the first time, we can launch and effectively train specialised AI models for generating 3D objects from a single photo. This is particularly important for our ongoing project to develop a unique solution for 3D modelling spectacle frames. We hope the new infrastructure will soon enable a significant technological breakthrough," says the VILNIUS TECH professor.
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