Nuno Costa

Pedro Antunes, Ana Rita Ortigoso, Gabriel Vieira et al.

The rise of Large Language Models (LLM) has increased the need for scalable, high-performance inference systems, yet most existing frameworks assume homogeneous, resource-rich hardware, often unrealistic in academic, or resource-constrained settings. We introduce AIvailable, a low-cost, highly available LLM-as-a-Service (LLMaaS) platform, that uses a software-defined approach for running LLMs across heterogeneous and legacy GPU nodes, including NVIDIA and AMD devices, with a focus on fully utilizing each node's VRAM. AIvailable operates as a fully GPU-accelerated inference without CPU fallbacks, featuring a unified client interface that allows seamless interaction with all deployed LLMs through a single logical unit. The architecture comprises four main components: the Client Interface for user access, the Service Frontend for secure request routing and load balancing, the SDAI Controller for orchestration, deployment, and monitoring, and the Service Backend of heterogeneous GPU nodes executing workloads. By abstracting GPU-specific details and providing dynamic, VRAM-aware allocation and reallocation of models, AIvailable ensures efficient use of resources and resilience against failures or workload fluctuations. Targeting academic labs, private companies, and other constrained organizations, it supports diverse open LLMs helping democratize generative AI through the repurposing of legacy GPUs.

Nuno Costa, Nuno Moniz

In natural phenomena, data distributions often deviate from normality. One can think of cataclysms as a self-explanatory example: events that occur almost never, and at the same time are many standard deviations away from the common outcome. In many scientific contexts it is exactly these tail events that researchers are most interested in anticipating, so that adequate measures can be taken to prevent or attenuate a major impact on society. Despite such efforts, we have yet to provide definite answers to crucial issues in evaluating predictive solutions in domains such as weather, pollution, health. In this paper, we deal with two encapsulated problems simultaneously. First, assessing the performance of regression models when non-uniform preferences apply - not all values are equally relevant concerning the accuracy of their prediction, and there's a particular interest in the most extreme values. Second, assessing the robustness of models when dealing with uncertainty regarding the actual underlying distribution of values relevant for such problems. We show how different levels of relevance associated with target values may impact experimental conclusions, and demonstrate the practical utility of the proposed methods.

Nuno Costa, Julija Zavadlav

Peptide self-assembly prediction offers a powerful bottom-up strategy for designing biocompatible, low-toxicity materials for large-scale synthesis in a broad range of biomedical and energy applications. However, screening the vast sequence space for categorization of aggregate morphology remains intractable. We introduce PepMorph, an end-to-end peptide discovery pipeline that generates novel sequences that are not only prone to aggregate but self-assemble into a specified fibrillar or spherical morphology. We compiled a new dataset by leveraging existing aggregation propensity datasets and extracting geometric and physicochemical isolated peptide descriptors that act as proxies for aggregate morphology. This dataset is then used to train a Transformer-based Conditional Variational Autoencoder with a masking mechanism, which generates novel peptides under arbitrary conditioning. After filtering to ensure design specifications and validation of generated sequences through coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations, PepMorph yielded 83% accuracy in intended morphology generation, showcasing its promise as a framework for application-driven peptide discovery.