The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has announced the funding and building of one of the largest computing systems dedicated to nonprofit life science research in the world. The effort will provide the scientific community with access to predictive models of healthy and diseased cells, leading to groundbreaking new discoveries that could help cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of this century.
The high-performance computing cluster, which is planned to comprise more than 1,000 GPUs, will enable artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models for biomedicine at scale. AI models could predict how an immune cell responds to an infection, like what happens at the cellular level when a child is born with a rare disease, or how a patient’s body will respond to a new medication.
In a statement, CZI Co-founder and Co-CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that AI is creating new opportunities in biomedicine, and building a high-performance computing cluster dedicated to life science research will accelerate progress on important scientific questions about how our cells work. “Developing digital models capable of predicting all cell types and cell states from the genome will help researchers better understand our cells and how they behave in health and disease,” he added.
