Nvidia will design Britain’s largest supercomputer following the $ 40 billion acquisition of Arm

American chipmaker Nvidia yesterday vowed to design a $ 52 million supercomputer in Cambridge, UK – weeks after announcing plans to buy British company Arm for $ 40 billion.

This supercomputer – dubbed the “Cambridge-1″ and intended for use in artificial intelligence research in healthcare – was announced by Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang at corporate GTC 2020 workshop.

” Tackling the world’s toughest challenges in healthcare requires incredibly powerful computing resources to take advantage of AI capabilities, ” said Huang. ” The Cambridge-1 supercomputer will serve as a hub for Britain’s technological innovations, and drive groundbreaking research done by researchers here in the healthcare and healthcare industry. drug making “.

Will officially go into operation at the end of 2020, the Cambridge-1 supercomputer will be the 29th most powerful machine in the world and the most powerful computer in the UK – Nvidia confirmed.

Researchers at GSK, AstraZeneca, Guy’s and St Thomas’s NHS Foundation Trust, King’s College London and Oxford Nanopore will be able to use the new supercomputer to find ways to solve medical challenges, including hot ones. Involved corona virus.

” Many scientists need state-of-the-art computers, and we will design one, ” said Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, Kimberly Powel, at the same time. adding that scientists will be able to carry out “large-scale research,” without which this supercomputer, they “can not do”.

Mr. Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of Nvidia

Nvidia says that Cambridge-1 will have ” AI performance ” at 400 petaflops, and it will be among the top 3 most energy efficient supercomputers in the world. If you do not know, the petaflop is a unit used to measure the processing speed of a computer.

Matt Hancock, UK health minister, said ” accelerating drug research has never been as important as it is now, ” and Nvidia’s investment could ” make a real difference ”

” Nvidia’s new supercomputer will assist the UK’s best experts to carry out research that will later save lives, ” said Hancock.

The Cambridge-1 supercomputer, which could be completed in a few weeks, will work thanks to 80 interlinked Nvidia systems.

When asked if Nvidia wants to make a profit from Cambridge-1, Powell told CNBC that Cambridge-1 was ” not a commercialization effort “.

AI has advantages as expected?

So far, AI has played a relatively small role in the response to a pandemic. Despite some success in limited areas, companies like DeepMind, OpenAI, Facebook AI Reserach, and Microsoft – all with their own supercomputers – remain relatively silent. in the context of the corona virus spreading around the world.

” This pandemic shows how nonsense AI expectations are most of the time, ” said Neil Lawrence, a former head of machine learning at Amazon Cambridge, in April.

” It’s great, and will come in handy one day, but in this pandemic, it is not surprising that we will return to traditional experimental and experimental techniques .”

Cambridge-1 is not the only supercomputer Nvidia plans to design at Cambridge.

When the Arm acquisition was announced on September 13, Huang said that Nvidia would design a new Arm-based supercomputer at an AI research center that hadn’t even been built in the city yet.

University of Cambridge, UK, where Nvidia plans to place the Cambridge-1 supercomputer

Tech scholars at Cambridge were skeptical of Nvidia’s commitment to the hub last week, when Nvidia and Cambridge University seemed to have very little to say about the project.

Powell said the Cambridge-1 was ” completely independent ” of Arm: ” This is Nvidia’s own effort to design an AI supercomputer for our research in the healthcare field. ”

Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm is clearly devoid of criticism and can still be stopped by both the UK government and the Competition and Market Authority (CMA), which is responsible for maintaining competitiveness in the market. Brother. Last week, two tech investors told CNBC they thought the deal would be blocked by someone.

Britain’s opposition Labor Party once declared the acquisition of Arm to be of public interest and criticized the ruling Conservative Party for failing to protect the British chip designer.

On September 21, Labor Party lawmaker Daniel Zeichner, a member of parliament representing Cambridge, urged the government to set clear conditions in the acquisition of Arm. He wanted legal guarantees regarding the issue of the Arm’s employment, Cambridge headquarters, and its business model. Zeichner also said that it was important to protect Britain’s technological sovereignty.

Reference: CNBC