Nvidia gives health researchers access to UK supercomputer

The Cambridge-1 supercomputer, which owner Nvidia Corp says is the United Kingdom's fastest supercomputer, is seen in Cambridge, Britain, in this undated handout photo obtained by Reuters. Courtesy of Nvidia Corp/Handout via REUTERS

(Reuters) - Nvidia Corp on Wednesday said it opened what it claims is the fastest UK supercomputer to outside researchers that include both academic scientists and commercial firms such as AstraZeneca PLC and GlaxoSmithKline PLC.

The chip supplier spent about $100 million on its Cambridge-1 system, which uses artificial intelligence to solve health research problems and was announced in October. In the case of AstraZeneca, for example, the system will learn about 1 billion chemical compounds represented by groups of characters that can be assembled into sentence-like structures.