The race to build pharma’s most powerful supercomputer gained a new entrant last month, when Bristol Myers Squibb said a newly expanded partnership with Nvidia would give it “the most powerful and energy-efficient single-owned Nvidia infrastructure in life sciences.”
Bristol Myers is the latest large pharmaceutical company to stake an AI-computing superlative claim along those lines. Eli Lilly said in October it would work with Nvidia to build “the most powerful supercomputer owned and operated by a pharmaceutical company.” In March, Roche said an expanded Nvidia collaboration gave it “the pharmaceutical industry’s largest announced hybrid-cloud AI factory,” with more than 3,500 GPUs, or graphics processing units.
But the companies are using different yardsticks when it comes to measuring what’s considered the “most powerful.” By Nvidia’s measure of operations per second, Bristol Myers’ planned system will be “the most advanced supercomputer in the biopharma industry,” said Rory Kelleher, senior director of business development for life sciences at Nvidia.
“There are other pharma companies that measure it by the number of GPUs [or] that measure it by one single system,” he said.
Whatever the metric, the companies are chasing the same prize: more computing power to train larger models, run more complex experiments and make drug discovery and development faster and more efficient. And they all need more AI power to do it.
