GSK, AstraZeneca, Guy?s and St Thomas? NHS Foundation Trust, King?s College London, Oxford Nanopore to Tap NVIDIA?s New ?Cambridge-1? AI Supercomputer
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Oct. 05, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --?GTC?? NVIDIA today announced that it is building the United Kingdom?s most powerful supercomputer, which it will make available to U.K. healthcare researchers using AI to solve pressing medical challenges, including those presented by COVID-19.
Expected to come online by year end, the ?Cambridge-1? supercomputer will be an?NVIDIA DGX?SuperPOD? system capable of delivering more than 400 petaflops of AI performance and 8 petaflops of Linpack performance, which would rank it No. 29 on the latest?TOP500?list of the world?s most powerful supercomputers. It will also rank among the world?s top 3 most energy-efficient supercomputers on the current?Green500?list. Among the first pharmaceutical companies to harness Cambridge-1 for research will be GSK and AstraZeneca. Additionally, researchers from Guy?s and St Thomas? NHS Foundation Trust, King?s College London and Oxford Nanopore Technologies plan to take advantage of the system. ?Tackling the world?s most pressing challenges in healthcare requires massively powerful computing resources to harness the capabilities of AI,? said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, in his?GPU Technology Conference keynote. ?The Cambridge-1 supercomputer will serve as a hub of innovation for the U.K., and further the groundbreaking work being done by the nation?s researchers in critical healthcare and drug discovery.? NVIDIA has previously announced that it intends to create an?AI Center of Excellence in Cambridge, featuring a new Arm-based supercomputer, which will serve as a hub of collaboration for AI researchers, scientists and startups across the U.K. As these plans develop, Cambridge-1 will become a part of that Center of Excellence, which will expand to include further supercomputers, and support more industries across the U.K. Four Key Focus Areas The system?s mission is to support and further enable the U.K. ecosystem of healthcare and life science researchers, which has become an epicenter for transformative healthcare research and discovery. Its four key focus areas will be:- Joint industry research?? Solving large-scale healthcare and data-science problems which otherwise could not be tackled due to their size, resulting in improved patient outcomes, increased success rates and decreased overall healthcare costs.
- University-granted compute time?? Access to NVIDIA GPU time will be donated as a resource to specific studies to contribute to the hunt for cures.
- Support AI startups?? NVIDIA will provide opportunities to learn ? and it will collaborate with startups to nurture the next generation and provide early access to AI tools.
- Educate future AI practitioners?? The system will serve as a destination for world-class researchers and provide hands-on experiences to the next generation.