Fresh off the back of the news that it is to purchase computer chip company Arm[1], also known as the "crown jewel" of UK tech, for $40 billion, Nvidia has announced that it is building a £40 million ($51.7 million) supercomputer dedicated to healthcare research – right where Arm's headquarters are located, in Cambridge.
Packing 400 petaflops of AI performance and eight petaflops of Linpack performance, the new Cambridge-1 supercomputer is pitched by Nvidia as the UK's most powerful supercomputer to date. It is expected to come online by the end of the year, and would rank 29th[2] on the latest list of most powerful supercomputers around the world.
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The device will be powered by 80 of Nvidia's DGX A100 systems, which are designed to build and run AI projects at a large scale – in this case, machine-learning applications designed specifically to advance healthcare research.
Unveiling Cambridge-1 at Nvidia's GPU Technology conference earlier this week, the company's CEO Jensen Huang 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 UK, and further the groundbreaking work being done by the nation's researchers in critical healthcare and drug discovery."
Researchers will be able to tap a suite of tools developed by Nvidia called Clara Discovery, which features pre-trained AI models and frameworks that are optimized for DGX systems. Leveraging data ranging from imaging to