Nvidia gives health researchers access to UK supercomputer

By Stephen Nellis

July 7 (Reuters) - Nvidia Corp on Wednesday said it
opened what it claims is the fastest UK supercomputer to outside
researchers that include both academic scientists and commercial
firms such as AstraZeneca PLC and GlaxoSmithKline PLC
.

The chip supplier spent about $100 million on its
Cambridge-1 system, which uses artificial intelligence to solve
health research problems and was announced in October. In the
case of AstraZeneca, for example, the system will learn about 1
billion chemical compounds represented by groups of characters
that can be assembled into sentence-like structures.

"They can use the technology to finetune the molecules for
aspects they care about, like binding to proteins or making them
safe for human consumption," Kimberly Powell, vice president and
general manager of Nvidia's healthcare business, said in an
interview.

King's College London and a National Health Service unit
will also use the system, as will privately held Oxford Nanopore
Technologies.

The move is among the steps Nvidia is taking to show a
commitment to the United Kingdom as it works to complete its $40
billion acquisition of Arm Ltd from Japan's SoftBank Group Corp
. British antitrust regulators are scrutinizing the
deal, which would transfer ownership of one of the country's
technological crown jewels from one foreign entity to another.

In conjunction with the deal, Nvidia has said it also plans
to build a supercomputing center in the United Kingdom using
Arm-designed chips.

Powell said the Cambridge-1 is aimed at researchers already
using smaller Nvidia-based systems for research. Nvidia said it
is offering use of the system for free and it will use what it
learns running the system to improve its future
healthcare-specific products.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by
Cynthia Osterman)