Described as the most important system within the pharmaceutical business, BioHive-2 on the Salt Lake Metropolis headquarters of Recursion debuts immediately at No. 35, up greater than 100 spots from its predecessor on the most recent TOP500 record of the world’s quickest supercomputers.
The advance represents the corporate’s most up-to-date effort to speed up drug discovery with NVIDIA applied sciences.
“Simply as with giant language fashions, we see AI fashions within the biology area enhance efficiency considerably as we scale our coaching with extra information and compute horsepower, which finally results in larger impacts on sufferers’ lives,” mentioned Recursion’s CTO, Ben Mabey, who’s been making use of machine studying to healthcare for greater than a decade.
BioHive-2 packs 504 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs linked on an NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand community to ship 2 exaflops of AI efficiency. The ensuing NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD is almost 5x quicker than Recursion’s first-generation system, BioHive-1.
Efficiency Powers Via Complexity
That efficiency is vital to fast progress as a result of “biology is insanely complicated,” Mabey mentioned.
Discovering a brand new drug candidate can take scientists years performing thousands and thousands of wet-lab experiments.
That work is important; Recursion’s scientists run greater than 2 million such experiments every week. However going ahead, they’ll use AI fashions on BioHive-2 to direct their platform to essentially the most promising biology areas to run their experiments.
“With AI within the loop immediately, we are able to get 80% of the worth with 40% of the moist lab work, and that ratio will enhance going ahead,” he mentioned.
Organic Knowledge Propels Healthcare AI
Recursion is collaborating with biopharma corporations equivalent to Bayer AG, Roche and Genentech. Over time, it additionally amassed a greater than 50-petabyte database of organic, chemical and affected person information, serving to it construct highly effective AI fashions which are accelerating drug discovery.
“We consider it’s one of many largest organic datasets on Earth — it was constructed with AI coaching in thoughts, deliberately spanning biology and chemistry,” mentioned Mabey, who joined the corporate greater than seven years in the past partly because of its dedication to constructing such a dataset.
Creating an AI Phenomenon
Processing that information on BioHive-1, Recursion developed a household of basis fashions known as Phenom. They flip a collection of microscopic mobile photos into significant representations for understanding the underlying biology.
A member of that household, Phenom-Beta, is now obtainable as a cloud API and the primary third-party mannequin on NVIDIA BioNeMo, a generative AI platform for drug discovery.
Over a number of months of analysis and iteration, BioHive-1 skilled Phenom-1 utilizing greater than 3.5 billion mobile photos. Recursion’s expanded system allows coaching much more highly effective fashions with bigger datasets in much less time.
The corporate additionally used NVIDIA DGX Cloud, hosted by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, to supply extra supercomputing assets to energy their work.
The Phenom-1 mannequin serves Recursion and its companions in a number of methods, together with discovering and optimizing molecules to deal with a wide range of ailments and cancers. Earlier fashions helped Recursion predict drug candidates for COVID-19 9 out of 10 occasions.
The corporate introduced its collaboration with NVIDIA in July. Lower than 30 days later, the mixture of BioHive-1 and DGX Cloud screened and analyzed a large chemical library to foretell protein targets for roughly 36 billion chemical compounds.
In January, the corporate demonstrated LOWE, an AI workflow engine with a natural-language interface to assist make its instruments extra accessible to scientists. And in April it described a billion-parameter AI mannequin it constructed to supply a brand new technique to predict the properties of key molecules of curiosity in healthcare.
Recursion makes use of NVIDIA software program to optimize its programs.
“We love CUDA and NVIDIA AI Enterprise, and we’re trying to see if NVIDIA NIM may help us distribute our fashions extra simply, each internally and to companions,” he mentioned.
A Shared Imaginative and prescient for Healthcare
The efforts are a part of a broad imaginative and prescient that Jensen Huang, NVIDIA founder and CEO, described in a hearth chat with Recursion’s chairman as transferring towards simulating biology.
“Now you can acknowledge and be taught the language of just about something with construction, and you may translate it to something with construction … That is the generative AI revolution,” Huang mentioned.
“We share an analogous view,” mentioned Mabey.
“We’re within the early phases of a really fascinating time the place simply as computer systems accelerated chip design, AI can pace up drug design. Biology is way more complicated, so it can take years to play out, however trying again, individuals will see this was an actual turning level in healthcare,” he added.
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Pictured at high: BioHive-2 with a number of members of the Recursion group (from left) Paige Despain, John Durkin, Joshua Fryer, Jesse Dean, Ganesh Jagannathan, Chris Gibson, Lindsay Ellinger, Michael Secora, Alex Timofeyev, and Ben Mabey.
