NVIDIA announces that it is building a supercomputer named “Cambridge-1,” claiming to be the United Kingdom’s most powerful supercomputer. It aims to help healthcare researchers to solve current medical challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic.
It will be an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD™ system with the capacity to deliver 400 petaflops of AI performance and 8 petaflops of Linpack performance. Usually, traditional supercomputers may take years to deploy, but the modular DGX SuperPOD architecture enables the system to be installed and operate in as little as a few weeks. Because of this, it would rank No. 29 on the latest TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Moreover, it is expected to become one of the top 3 most energy-efficient supercomputers on the current Green500 list.
NVIDIA has previously announced that it will create an AI Center of Excellence in Cambridge that will feature a new Arm-based supercomputer, a good platform for AI researchers, scientists, and start-ups to collaborate and work across the UK. With the progress of these plans, Cambridge-1 will become a part of this center. NVIDIA plans to invest around £40 million ($51.7 million) in Cambridge-1.
Four key focus areas
This system’s main motive is to support the UK ecosystem and healthcare researchers in finding solutions to the pressing challenges and developing further. Thus, it focuses on typically four points mentioned as follows:
- Joint industry research: It focuses on solving large-scale healthcare and data-science problems, which are not solvable because of their size.
- University-granted computer time: Access to NVIDIA GPU time will be donated as a resource to specific studies to contribute to the hunt for cures.
- Support AI start-ups: NVIDIA will allow opportunities to learn and collaborate with start-ups to develop innovative changes.
- Educate future AI practitioners: It will provide a platform for the upcoming generations to gain hands-on experience.
GSK and AstraZeneca are among the very first pharmaceutical companies to harness Cambridge-1 for research. Other top companies, tech start-ups, and academia and research members are planning to use this for solo and joint projects concerned about better patient care, diagnosis, and delivery of critical medicines and vaccines around the world.
Source: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-building-uks-most-powerful-supercomputer-dedicated-to-ai-research-in-healthcare
Shilpi is a Contributor to Marktechpost.com. She is currently pursuing her third year of B.Tech in computer science and engineering from IIT Bhubaneswar. She has a keen interest in exploring latest technologies. She likes to write about different domains and learn about their real life applications.
