What a year and what a ride. For me (and for us an organization), 2025 truly became the year of AI infrastructure delivery. Our first major projects went live, and while we prepared thoroughly building new knowledge and skills along the way, there was still that underlying excitement and question: are we really ready for this? Sneak preview: Yes, we were!
AI Supercomputer #SPIKE-1 Goes Live
One of the most exciting projects was the installation of AI supercomputer #SPIKE-1 for Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e). Everything we had architected and designed upfront came together at the end of February in Finland. In the icy conditions of Kajaani (-22 C), at the Borealis Data Center, we brought #SPIKE-1 to life. Over 17 intense days of racking, stacking, cabling, labeling, and software installation (with a bit of sightseeing mixed in), the team worked long days.
BTW, Finland is a wonderful country and if you really put effort into the Finnish culture your will find that the Finns are warm and very friendly people. Arttu Sainio and Sami Kuusniemi, thank you for your great support (throughout this year) and make us feel ‘at home.’
After those 17 days, we returned home to our families—with the inevitable doubt: does everything really work, and is everything truly in place? Fortunately, it was. The system performed well, and we were ready for the next phase: acceptance and full delivery to the customer. That meant another period of intense workweeks, resolving a wide range of software and hardware tuning and tweaks together with our vendors. But at the beginning of April, we delivered!
A Team Effort
I am tremendously proud of my team, Dylan Anker and Roel Keller (and a bit of myself too). Over the past two years, I pushed them hard to reskill—moving from a Windows desktop background into the world of cloud-native technologies, Linux, Kubernetes, AI, DevOps, CI/CD, and many other tools that were entirely new to us. All of this while continuing daily operations and keeping our customers satisfied. You did an outstanding job.
From Delivery to Operations
After the handover, we shifted from delivery into management mode. #SPIKE-1 quickly proved to be a hungry beast—not only in terms of sustainable green power consumption, but also in the level of care and attention it required. The first customer projects went live, and not a small proof-of-concept workload, but immediately a large-scale 3D MRI scan detection model based on 150 TB of data. Together with nick brummans and his team (Bas Maat, Hengjian Zhang and Bram van Berlo), we learned a great deal—sometimes the hard way, but with many positive outcomes as well. Thank you for your support and trust!
TU/e Supercomputing Center for AI – HPC – Quantum
The TU/e Supercomputing Center team turned out to be a group of highly skilled and intelligent professionals, and together we transformed the system into a true AI-driven research powerhouse. It became clear that we needed each other: TU/e relied on us to tune and optimize the infrastructure, and we relied on them to understand the real-world workloads placed on #SPIKE-1. While we are all still learning, the outlook is very promising. TU/e can now fully focus on research, knowing the platform is in safe hands.
Growing as an Organization
Another major milestone this year—for me and for our organization—was adopting ISO standards. We took a significant step toward becoming a mature, process-driven organization. While we had been working with processes and procedures for years, we have now fully transitioned to ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 compliance, with quality and information security supported by both internal and external audits. Anyone who has been through this knows how intensive the journey is—from the preparation to the audits themselves. Thank you, Kim Drielinger and Niels Van Rees, as the Three Musketeers of ISO, we couldn’t do it any better!
We found a strong partner in Steven Vogelaar of Jaguar IT. Steven supported us by leading the ISO process, documentation effort, and guiding us through every step toward the external audit. We are now awaiting the final verdict.
Looking Ahead
For now, the year is almost behind us, although I say that while we are still working on the final maintenance window for #SPIKE-1. Soon it will be time to step back, return to our families, and celebrate Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
It has been a busy and demanding year, with long hours and intense periods of work. At the same time, this new era of AI energizes me tremendously. While I hope the coming year will be a bit less intense, I am genuinely looking forward to what lies ahead on our AI journey—my role being to guide and manage it from the technical side.
I wish you, and your loved ones, a very Merry Christmas and a happy—and above all—healthy New Year. Make it count.
| Michel Cosman Chief Technical Officer | MDCS.AI |
