| AI + T |
U.S. chipmaker Nvidia vowed Monday to build a $52 million (£40 million) supercomputer in Cambridge, England; weeks after announcing it plans to purchase British rival Arm for $40 billion.
The supercomputer named Cambridge-1 and intended for artificial intelligence (AI) research in health care was unveiled by Nvidia founder and Chief Executive Jensen Huang at the company’s GTC 2020 conference on Monday.
“Tackling the world’s most pressing challenges in health care requires massively powerful computing resources to harness the capabilities of AI,” Huang expressed during his 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.”
Expected to launch by the end of this year, the Cambridge-1 machine will be the 29th most powerful computer in the world and the most powerful in Britain, Nvidia alleged.
Researchers at AstraZeneca, GSK, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS (National Health Service) Foundation Trust, King’s College London and Oxford Nanopore will be able to use the supercomputer to attempt resolve medical tasks, including those presented by the COVID-19.
“There are scientists that need a state-of-the-art computer and we are going to build one,” suggested Nvidia Vice President of Healthcare Kimberly Powell on a press call ahead of the announcement, adding that they’ll be able to do large scale research that they otherwise would not be able to do.
Nvidia expressed Cambridge-1 will have 400 petaflops of “AI performance” and that it will rank in the top three most energy efficient supercomputers in the world. A petaflop is a measure of a computer’s processing speed.
Matt Hancock, Britain’s health minister, shared “accelerating drug discovery has never been so important” and that the investment can “make a real difference.”
“Nvidia’s new supercomputer will aid the U.K.’s best and brightest to undertake research that will save lives,” said Hancock in a statement.
Nvidia’s Cambridge-1 supercomputer will be used to power AI research in healthcare.
Tags: Artificial Intelligence
