Nvidia Corp on Wednesday said it opened what it claims is that the fastest UK supercomputer to outside researchers that include both academic scientists and commercial firms like AstraZeneca PLC and GlaxoSmithKline PLC.
The chip supplier spent about $100 million on its Cambridge-1 system, which uses AI to unravel health research problems and was announced in October. within the case of AstraZeneca, for instance , the system will study 1 billion chemical compounds represented by groups of characters which will be assembled into sentence-like structures.
“They can use the technology to finetune the molecules for aspects they care about, like binding to proteins or making them safe for human consumption,” Kimberly Powell, vice chairman and head of Nvidia’s healthcare business, said in an interview.
King’s College London and a National Health Service unit also will use the system, as will privately held Oxford Nanopore Technologies.
The move is among the steps Nvidia is taking to point out a commitment to the uk because it works to finish its $40 billion acquisition of Arm Ltd from Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp.
British antitrust regulators are scrutinizing the deal, which might transfer ownership of 1 of the country’s technological crown jewels from one foreign entity to a different .
In conjunction with the deal, Nvidia has said it also plans to create a supercomputing center within the uk using Arm-designed chips.
Powell said the Cambridge-1 is aimed toward researchers already using smaller Nvidia-based systems for research. Nvidia said it’s offering use of the system for free of charge and it’ll use what it learns running the system to enhance its future healthcare-specific products.
