Webinar Jean Zay 4 Grand Challenges AION-1 on 14 September 2026 at 4:30 pm
For your information, GENCI is organizing a webinar "Grands Challenges Jean Zay 4: AION-1, a multimodal foundation model for astronomy" on Monday, September 14, 2026, at 4:30 PM.
This webinar focuses on AION-1, a multimodal foundation model for astronomy that was awarded 200,000 H100 GPU hours on the Jean Zay supercomputer through the "Grands Challenges" program. It was developed by an international team (including CNRS/IDRIS, Paris-Saclay University, Flatiron Institute, and the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford). François Lanusse, a member of the team, will present the project during the webinar.
In response to the explosion of astronomical data, AION-1 is the first model to unify the analysis of heterogeneous observations—images, spectra, and scalar measurements—within a single architecture comprising over 3 billion parameters. Trained on 120 terabytes of data covering more than 200 million celestial objects from five major astronomical surveys (Legacy Survey, Hyper Suprime-Cam, SDSS, DESI, and Gaia), it enables astrophysicists to interpret data from diverse instruments and rapidly adapt to new scientific tasks , with only around a hundred annotated examples. To date, AION-1 is the largest AI model ever trained in astrophysics , and more broadly in physics.
Join us to discover this project presented directly by the research team.
Kind regards,
The GENCI team
Nicolas Belot Chief Communication Officer and European relations