According to Reuters, Schrödinger routinely evaluates thousands of molecules for every possible drug, based on his physics tests, but now he will be able to do so using machine learning systems.
Through collaboration, the entire pharmaceutical industry – made up of more than 3,000 companies, from startups to multinationals – will be able to further accelerate drug discovery at the supercomputer scale.
“Computational drug discovery improves accuracy with Schrödinger’s advanced combination of simulation and machine learning,” said Kimberly Powell, vice president of Health Care at Nvidia.
Not just AI, but also data centers
Alongside this partnership, Nvidia’s focus on new business development is increasing as it also introduced a new chipset: Grace.
Intel is the world’s largest manufacturer of core processors for data center servers, but it faces increasing competition from Arm-based chips. With its “Grace” server processor, Nvidia will be the largest chip company Intel has ever challenged in its main market.
Shares of Nvidia were up 2.6% and Intel’s were down 4% during afternoon trading after the news.
Arm’s technology powers the chips in most smartphones, but has made its way to data centers in recent years, with companies like Amazon and Ampere Computing designing chips for these companies.
Nvidia’s entry into the market could speed Arm’s forays into data centers. Nvidia chips have traditionally been used as “accelerators” alongside existing core processors from Intel, Advanced Micro Devices or others, relieving some of the computing workload and speeding up the overall computing system.
By manufacturing its own core processor, Nvidia is tackling Intel and AMD head-on for the first time. In the GTC’s keynote address, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called the new server chip the “final piece of the puzzle” that will unite Nvidia’s graphics card and network chips to form the “foundation building block of the modern data center.”