Santa Clara, Calif.–based NVIDIA has launched the Cambridge-1, which it hails as “the United Kingdom’s most powerful supercomputer.”
Developed with healthcare applications in mind, NVIDIA invested some $100 million in the supercomputer.
Initial applications of the Cambridge-1 include using AI to improve drug development, explore the causes of dementia and identify genomic-based disease risk factors.
Early users of the Cambridge-1 include AstraZeneca (LON:AZN), GSK (NYSE:GSK), Oxford Nanopore, King’s College London, St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and Oxford Nanopore Technologies.
AstraZeneca’s focus of the computer will be on creating an open-source transformer-based generative AI model for chemical structures. The model can be used to predict chemical reactions, optimize molecules and generate de novo molecules.
AstraZeneca and NVIDIA are also teaming up to use Cambridge-1 to facilitate digital pathology to accelerate the process of annotating whole slide tissue sample images.
Cambridge-1 supercomputer from NVIDIA
GSK plans to use the computer to genetically validate targets for drug development. GSK has already made significant investments in AI and genomics. The company expects Cambridge-1 to add additional computational horsepower to its drug discovery efforts.
Cambridge-1 uses NVIDIA’s DGX A100 SuperPOD technology, which is also present in the company’s Selene supercomputer, which the Top 500 rankings of supercomputers ranked as the sixth fastest.
The Cambridge-1 draws its power from entirely renewable sources.
“The discoveries developed on Cambridge-1 will take shape in the U.K., but the impact will be global, driving groundbreaking research that has the potential to benefit millions around the world,” said NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang in a statement.