The National Health Research Institutes (NHRI) in Taiwan has announced a partnership with Nvidia and Asus to deliver the nation’s first biomedical supercomputer. NHRI — a nonprofit foundation established by the Taiwanese government to promote biomedical research and health policy — says that the system will be used to support the NHRI’s application of AI in biomedical fields.

The NHRI says that the system will leverage Nvidia’s “latest-generation AI supercomputer,” though it was unclear whether they meant the already-popular A100-based systems or the recently announced H100-based systems. These Nvidia systems will be supplemented by an AI-HPC cloud platform developed by Asus’ Computer Cloud Architecture Software Center. NHRI says that this system will enable developers and data scientists to develop, deploy and test applications for biomedical AI, and that it will generally shorten the processing time of the “huge amounts of data” that NHRI has at its disposal.

“Through this tripartite cooperation, the core technology of AI for medical and health information in Taiwan and the application of smart medical care will be developed,” the NHRI said (in translation). The NHRI said that it will use the system (and the AI it enables) to develop potential novel biomarkers; explore the mechanisms and diagnosis of diseases; and promote the development of novel drugs and vaccines. Further, they said that they anticipate cultivating interdisciplinary talent in biomedical, data science and general IT fields, as well as cooperating with medical schools and corporations. “[We are] looking forward to jointly promoting the innovation and application of AI in the field of biomedicine, and jointly creating a bright future for Taiwan’s precision health strategic industry,” the NHRI wrote.

“We are thrilled to partner up with Nvidia to build integrated datacenter platforms for high-performance computing, AI and data analytics, designed for the National Health Research Institutes,” Asus wrote on LinkedIn. “This represents a key milestone in the development of Taiwan’s precision health and biotechnology territory, as well as in our journey to build the leading generation of cutting-edge technology for Taiwan and the industry worldwide.”

Taiwan currently has two supercomputers that rank in the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers: Taiwania 2 (9 Linpack petaflops, 54th, pictured above) and Taiwania 3 (2.30 Linpack petaflops, 278th). Both are based at the National Center for High Performance Computing in Taiwan, were deployed in the last four years, and were built in collaboration with Asus Cloud (in addition to Quanta Computer and Taiwan Fixed Network).

Header image: the launch ceremony for the partnership. Image courtesy of the NHRI.