Bavaria’s Science Minister visits new GPU Cluster “Helma” at FAU

During a recent visit to FAU, the Bavarian State Minister for Science and the Arts Markus Blume was introduced to the newly inaugurated high-performance GPU cluster Helma by Prof. Bernhard Kainz, University President Prof. Joachim Hornegger, Prof. Gerhard Wellein, and Prof. Wolfram Burgard.

Helma, hosted at the Erlangen National High Performance Computing Center (NHR@FAU https://hpc.fau.de/), is equipped with the latest NVIDIA H100 GPUs and AMD Genoa CPUs. It represents a major step forward in computational capacity for artificial intelligence in medicine.

Prof. Kainz and his team are using Helma to train foundational models of human anatomy and disease, spanning scales from population-level variation down to cellular processes. The aim is to create a comprehensive, multimodal model of the human body and its pathologies, an AI that encapsulates the medical knowledge of millions of patient consultations.

“We are building digital tools that will empower the most brilliant physicians in the world, right here in Bavaria.” said Kainz. “By integrating massive datasets and biomedical understanding, we are opening doors to previously unimagined insights into the human body’s function and dysfunction.”

With its world-class compute infrastructure and strong academic-industrial partnerships, AIBE at FAU continues to drive innovation in responsible and trustworthy AI for medicine.