While Nvidia’s Cambridge-1 is not the first supercomputer in the world, it certainly will be one of the few built with the latest technology.
The foremost technology company NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA) is set to build the United Kingdom’s largest supercomputer worth £40 million ($52 million). Per a report from CNBC, the proposed supercomputer from NVIDIA (NVDA) named “Cambridge-1” will be established in Cambridge England and deployed in Artificial Intelligence endeavors to promote research in medicine and healthcare.
The announcement comes weeks after the company revealed plans to purchase Arm, its UK rival, but the company has noted that the proposed supercomputer is a sole NVDA venture independent of Arm. The company has however noted that among the first categories of pharmaceutical firms to take advantage of the capabilities of Cambridge-1 will be GlaxoSmithKline Plc (NYSE: GSK), AstraZeneca Plc (LON: AZN). Additionally, researchers from Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, King’s College London, and Oxford Nanopore Technologies also plan to take harness the powers of the system.
With AI in healthcare in focus possibly fueled by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Jensen Huang, founder, and CEO of NVIDIA, in his GPU Technology Conference keynote said:
“Tackling the world’s most pressing challenges in healthcare requires massively powerful computing resources to harness the capabilities of AI, 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.”
The underlying focus areas Nvidia noted with respect to the research opportunities the supercomputer will offer includes fostering Joint Research ventures, University-granted Compute time, Support AI startups as well as Educate future AI practitioners.
Meanwhile, Nvidia stock is up 4.06% with a $21.19 addition to peg at $543.68.
NVIDIA Cambridge-1 Supercomputer: Placing UK on the Map of AI Powerhouses
While Cambridge-1 is not the first supercomputer in the world, it certainly will be one of the few with the latest technology. Nvidia said Cambridge-1 will have 400 petaflops of “AI performance” and as such, it will rank in the top three most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world. The system will be powered by 80 Nvidia systems that are connected together.
According to the company, the primary and only aim of the supercomputer is not to generate profit but to help serve the body of science while attracting great minds to the UK.
“We will create an open center of excellence in the area once home to giants like Isaac Newton and Alan Turing, for whom key NVIDIA technologies are named. Here, leading scientists, engineers and researchers from the UK and around the world will come to develop their ideas, collaborate and conduct their ground-breaking work in areas like healthcare, life sciences, self-driving cars and other fields. We want the UK to attract the best minds and talent from around the world,” the company said in a statement in September.
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