Someone’s got to keep, say, Nvidia on its toes
In the race to provide the best machine-learning accelerators, one of Nvidia’s top challengers has claimed a victory in the biotech space, London firm LabGenius, which said Graphcore’s intelligence processing units (IPUs) provide significantly faster performance for AI-based drug discovery than some unidentified traditional GPUs. Founded in 2012, LabGenius is a venture-backed company that develops antibody treatments for cancer and inflammatory diseases by leaning on machine-learning algorithms and laboratory automation to discover proteins that have the right qualities to treat medical conditions. In a blog post to be published Thursday, and seen by The Register, Bristol, UK-based Graphcore is set to reveal LabGenius turned to its IPUs to train a BERT Transformer model on a large data set of existing proteins to predict masked amino acids. This, in turn, we’re told, helped LabGenius suss out important protein features that can help it develop new therapies. By using Graphcore IPUs provided in cloud instances from Cirrascale Cloud Services, LabGenius said training the model took about two weeks, down from the month it previously took using GPUs.
