NVIDIA Deploys Cambridge-1 As UK's Fastest Supercomputer For Health Research
Though it has been more than a few weeks, and we have long since passed the end of 2020, the U.K’s most powerful supercomputer is now operational. Powered by NVIDIA hardware, the Cambridge-1 is a $100 million, 400 petaflop beast of a computer that ranks “among the world’s top 50 fastest computers and is powered by 100 percent renewable energy.”
Under the hood, the Cambridge-1 supercomputer is powered by 80 DGX A100 systems tied together, each featuring NVIDIA A100 GPUs, BlueField-2 DPUs, and NVIDIA HDR InfiniBand networking. The whole system is an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD that delivers the aforementioned 400 petaflops of AI performance and eight petaflops of Linpack performance at a facility run by NVIDIA partner Kao Data.
This sort of AI performance will then be utilized by several different colleges and organizations around the U.K. This includes AstraZeneca and GSK working to discover drugs faster, King’s College London, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust working to help understand diseases such as dementia, and Oxford Nanopore working to sequence genomes faster. As NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang explains, “The discoveries developed on Cambridge-1 will take shape in the U.K., but the impact will be global, driving groundbreaking research that has the potential to benefit millions around the world.”
Hopefully, we will continue to hear the great things that come out of this project, but for now, research is only getting started. Moreover, perhaps NVIDIA will continue to deploy supercomputers such as this one to further science and medicine worldwide. Either way, this is an amazing first step, but let us know what you think about it in the comments below.
