Not quite the Nostromo, but Nvidia's new AI and health care supercomputer has the feel of something out of a '70s sci-fi movie: the $100 million supercomputer, called Cambridge-1, is designed to examine variations in disease, design drugs, and find new treatments. variations of diseases, design drugs, and find new cures.

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If not the most stylish supercomputer we've ever seen (show us a supercomputer reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey), it is certainly at least Albion's most powerful. Cambridge-1, with 80 golden DGX A100 systems, is now online as the most powerful supercomputer in the UK.

Each DGX system contains eight A100 GPUs, which use the same Ampere architecture as the latest GeForce RTX 30 series cards, along with NVSwitch, BlueField 2 DPUs, and AMD EPYC CPUs. In total, Nvidia claims that this will result in 8 petaflops of Linpack supercomputer benchmark performance and 400 petaflops of AI acceleration. [Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said, "Cambridge-1 will empower world-class researchers in business and academia with the ability to run their life's work on the most powerful supercomputer in the UK, at a scale and It will unlock clues to diseases and cures at a scale and speed previously not possible in the UK. While the discoveries developed at Cambridge-1 will materialize in the UK, their impact will be global, driving groundbreaking research that has the potential to benefit millions of people around the world." [Cambridge-1's initial work includes work for AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline on drug discovery, teaching AI models to generate synthetic brain models that can be used to enable early diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as dementia, stroke, brain tumors, multiple sclerosis This includes work for King's College London and Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust.

NVIDIA promised such a supercomputer as part of its plan to acquire Cambridge-based chip design firm Arm. However, the deal has not yet been formalized, and Nvidia faces regulatory action in the UK due to national security concerns. [However, once Cambridge-1 is completed next summer, it will face stiff competition from the Meteorological Office and Microsoft's advanced weather and climate supercomputer in the near future. The project is estimated to cost a total of 1.2 billion pounds ($1.6 billion). The finished product will also be special in that it will run solely on renewable energy.