REUTERS: Nvidia Corp announced on Wednesday that it has made the fastest UK supercomputer available to independent researchers, including academics and commercial companies such as AstraZeneca PLC and GlaxoSmithKline PLC. The chipmaker spent around $100 million on the Cambridge-1 system, which was launched in October and uses artificial intelligence to handle health research concerns. The system will learn approximately 1 billion chemical compounds represented by groupings of characters that can be constructed into sentence-like forms in the case of AstraZeneca, for example.
In an interview, Kimberly Powell, vice president and general manager of Nvidia’s healthcare business, said, “They can utilize the technology to finetune the molecules for things they care about, like attaching to proteins or making them safe for human consumption.”
The system will also be used by King’s College London and a National Health Service unit, as well as privately held Oxford Nanopore Technologies.
As it seeks to complete its US$40 billion acquisition of Arm Ltd from Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp, Nvidia is taking steps to demonstrate its commitment to the UK. The acquisition, which would shift ownership of one of the country’s technological crown jewels from one foreign corporation to another, is being scrutinized by British antitrust regulators. Nvidia also announced intentions to create a supercomputing facility in the United Kingdom utilizing Arm-designed chips as part of the contract.
The Cambridge-1, according to Powell, is aimed at scholars who already conduct study on smaller Nvidia-based computers. Nvidia said it will provide free access to the system and will utilize what it learns from it to create future healthcare-specific products. (In San Francisco, Stephen Nellis reported; Cynthia Osterman edited.)/n
