Through a new partnership with GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and the U.K.’s National Health Service, the chip maker Nvidia plans to build Great Britain’s most powerful supercomputer—and dedicate its use to artificial intelligence research in healthcare.
Dubbed Cambridge-1, the machine is designed to deliver 400 petaflops of performance, or 400 quadrillion floating-point calculations per second.
When presented with dense systems of linear equations used in AI—such as simulations of molecular models and chemical interactions among potential drug compounds—it is expected to provide 8 petaflops of supercomputing power, ranking it number 29 on the list of the world’s fastest.
Image: Nvidia's Cambridge-1 is expected to come online before the end of the year as the most powerful supercomputer in the U.K. and the 29th fastest in the world. GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca are slated as the first to receive access. (Nvidia)