Cambridge-1 - the UK's fastest AI supercomputer

Nvidia today formally launched Cambridge-1, a supercomputer dedicated to life sciences research.

Leveraging Nvidia’s SuperPOD architecture, it will have 80 DGX A100s, 20 terabytes/sec InfiniBand and 2 petabytes of NVMe memory. Totalling nearly 400 petaflops AI compute, Cambridge-1 finished 41st on the June 2021 Top500 List, making it the fastest supercomputer based in the UK, and placing 12th overall in the EU.

The new system has been named for University of Cambridge, where the supercomputer will be located and where Francis Crick and James Watson and their colleagues famously worked on solving the structure of DNA.

" Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO stated, “Cambridge-1 will empower world-leading researchers in business and academia, with the ability to perform their life’s work on the UK’s most powerful supercomputer, unlocking clues to disease and treatments at a scale and speed previously impossible.

The discoveries developed on Cambridge-1 will take shape in the UK, but the impact will be global, driving ground-breaking research that has the potential to benefit millions around the world.”

Cambridge-1 represents a $100 million investment by US-based computing company Nvidia, with collaboration projects with AstraZeneca, GSK, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, King’s College London and Oxford Nanopore Technologies. They will endeavour to drive a deeper understanding of brain diseases like dementia, designing new drugs and improving the accuracy of finding disease-causing variations in human genomes.”

As Nvidia's top performing GPU partner in the UK, we provide infrastructure and hosting AI solutions in both life sciences and many other sectors. More information on our AI inception programme can be found here.