The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is constructing a brand new, costly GPU AI cluster for medical analysis

The Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Basis is funding the development of a large pc system for medical analysis. It’s going to encompass greater than 1,000 GPUs. And this is not simply any graphics card – these are top-of-the-line H100 GPUs which can be extremely wanted for AI-focused servers.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) makes actually daring claims about what it hopes this computing system will be capable to do. A press launch claims that the computing system “will result in groundbreaking new discoveries that might assist deal with, forestall or handle all ailments by the tip of this century.”

The aim is to offer researchers entry to generative AI to review wholesome and diseased cells. Utilizing predictive fashions of human cells can assist researchers higher perceive how the physique responds to ailments or new medicine. It is like working a “digital cell” by totally different simulations to see what would possibly occur, as Chan and her husband Zuckerberg, co-founders of CZI, defined in an article in MIT Know-how Assessment.

“AI fashions can predict how an immune cell will reply to an an infection, what occurs on the mobile stage when a child is born with a uncommon illness, and even how a affected person’s physique will reply to a brand new drug,” Chan says within the press launch. .

The issue is that these instruments may be so costly that they’re past the attain of many scientists. That is what CZI needs to alter. The brand new GPU cluster is predicted to run “brazenly obtainable” human cell fashions as a way to speed up medical analysis and encourage scientists to work collaboratively, CZI says.

To develop new AI fashions, the CZI-funded computing system will probably be skilled on present datasets. This contains knowledge from Chan Zuckerberg’s software program instrument that has already listed about 50 million distinctive cells.

As soon as accomplished, the brand new computing system is predicted to be one of many largest AI clusters utilized in nonprofit analysis. Nevertheless it won’t be as massive as comparable programs used to develop industrial merchandise within the non-public sector, in keeping with the World Financial institution MIT Know-how Assessment article.

CZI’s Biohub community will buy the GPUs. The “biocenters” convey collectively totally different technical and scientific establishments “with the goal of pursuing main scientific challenges over a 10-15 yr time horizon,” in keeping with the community. A workforce from the San Francisco Biocenter was tasked with organising the brand new computing system.