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Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan\u2019s foundation is funding the construction of a massive computing system for medical research. It\u2019ll be made up of more than 1,000 GPUs. And these aren\u2019t just any graphics card \u2014 they\u2019re top-of-the-line H100 GPUs that are highly sought after for AI-focused servers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is making really bold claims about what it hopes this computing system will be able to do. A press release<\/a> claims the computing system \u201cwill lead to groundbreaking new discoveries that could help cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of this century.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n The aim is to give researchers access to generative AI to study healthy and diseased cells. Using predictive models of human cells can help researchers better understand how the body responds to diseases or new medicines. It\u2019s like running a \u201cvirtual cell\u201d through different simulations to see what might happen, as CZI co-founders Chan and her husband Zuckerberg put it in an essay<\/a> in MIT Technology Review.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cAI models could predict how an immune cell responds to an infection, what happens at the cellular level when a child is born with a rare disease, or even how a patient\u2019s body will respond to a new medication.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cAI models could predict how an immune cell responds to an infection, what happens at the cellular level when a child is born with a rare disease, or even how a patient\u2019s body will respond to a new medication,\u201d Chan says in the press release. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n The thing is, these tools can be so expensive that they\u2019re out of reach for many scientists. That\u2019s what CZI wants to change. The new GPU cluster is expected to power \u201copenly available\u201d models of human cells in order to speed up medical research and encourage scientists to work collaboratively, CZI says. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n To develop new AI models, the CZI-funded computing system will be trained on existing datasets. That includes data from a Chan Zuckerberg software tool<\/a>\u00a0that has already cataloged some 50 million unique cells. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Once completed, the new computing system is expected to be one of the biggest AI clusters used for nonprofit research. But it still won\u2019t be as big as similar systems used to develop commercial products in the private sector, according to the MIT Technology Review <\/em>essay. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n CZI\u2019s Biohub Network will purchase the GPUs. The \u201cbiohubs\u201d bring together different tech and science institutions \u201cwith the goal of pursuing grand scientific challenges on a 10- to 15-year time horizon,\u201d according to the network. A team at the San Francisco biohub is tasked with setting up the new computing system.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n