NVIDIA Invests £40 Million to Boost COVID-19 Research

NVIDIA announced, on Monday, its plans to build the UK’s fastest ''Cambridge-1'' supercomputer with £40 million to help researchers solve pressing medical challenges, related to COVID-19.

According to Nvidia, GSK and AstraZeneca, which are both involved in coronavirus vaccine research, will be two of the first pharmaceutical companies to harness the machine power. On other hand, the firm founder and CEO Jensen Huang in his GPU Technology Conference keynote, explained that tackling the world’s most pressing challenges in healthcare requires massively powerful computing resources to harness the Al capabilities .

Accelerating drug discovery has never been so important and it is investment like this that can make a real difference in our fight against countless diseases, UK Health secretary Matt Hancock reported.

It expected to come online by year end, the ''Cambridge-1'' supercomputer will be an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD™ system capable of delivering more than 400 petaflops of AI performance and 8 petaflops of Linpack performance, which would rank it No. 29 on the latest TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, Forbes reported.

Also, it will rank among the world’s top 3 most energy-efficient supercomputers on the current Green500 list.

NVIDIA will help researchers take advantage of NVIDIA Clara Discovery™, a state-of-the-art suite of tools optimized for NVIDIA DGX™ that brings together the power of imaging, radiology and genomics to develop AI applications for the biggest computational tasks of healthcare.

It features pre-trained AI models and application-specific frameworks to help researchers define the next generation of drug discovery processes, from finding targets to building compounds to developing responses.