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Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s foundation is funding the construction of a massive computing system for medical research. It will be made up of more than 1,000 GPUs. And these aren’t just any graphics cards: these are highly sought-after high-end H100 GPUs for AI-focused servers.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is making some very bold claims about what it hopes this computer system will be able to do. A press release claims that the computer system “will lead to revolutionary new discoveries that could help cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of this century.”
The goal 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 drugs. It’s like running a “virtual cell” through different simulations to see what might happen, as Chan and her husband Zuckerberg, co-founders of CZI, explained in an essay published in 2007. MIT Technology Review.
“AI 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’s body will respond to a new drug.”
“AI 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’s body will react to a new drug,” explains Chan in the press release. .
The fact is that these tools can be so expensive that they are out of reach for many scientists. This is what CZI wants to change. The new GPU cluster is expected to power “openly available” human cell models to accelerate medical research and encourage scientists to work collaboratively, according to CZI.
To develop new AI models, the CZI-funded computing system will be trained on existing datasets. This includes data from a Chan Zuckerberg software tool that has already cataloged some 50 million unique cells.
Once completed, the new computing system is expected to become one of the largest AI clusters used for nonprofit research. But it still won’t be as large as similar systems used to develop commercial products in the private sector, according to the MIT Technology Review essay.
CZI’s Biohub network will purchase the GPUs. “Biohubs” bring together different technological and scientific institutions “with the aim of meeting major scientific challenges over a 10 to 15 year horizon,” according to the network. A team from the San Francisco biohub is responsible for setting up the new IT system.
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