Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
The Jensen and Lori Huang Foundation, co-founded by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and his wife Lori recently provided the UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design (IPD) with a transformational computing grant totaling nearly 7 million GPU hours. The model is claimed to design proteins up to 10 times faster and uses biomolecular reasoning to improve how well scientists can design new proteins with specific functions. Earlier this month, the Jensen and Lori Huang Foundation, granted totaling nearly 7 million hours of compute time, will accelerate the IPD’s development of open-source AI models for protein design.
The lab recently introduced RFD4-Proteina, an open, generative model co-developed by IPD and Nvidia.
“Most of the most important medicines of the future will come from proteins that have never existed,” said Jensen Huang, co-president of the Huang Foundation. The in-kind grant provided access to graphics processing units. These specialized AI computing systems will cut algorithm learning and evaluation time from months to days. It will help IPD scientists solve complex protein-design problems in such areas as precision cancer therapeutics, durable vaccines, currently untreatable diseases and new enzymes that degrade environmental toxins like long-lasting hazardous chemicals and plastics. The compute power is provided through the Huang Foundation’s partnership with CoreWeave using NVIDIA graphics processing units, or GPUs. “For David Baker and the Institute for Protein Design, this path means training AI on tens of millions of molecular structures, learning from virtual experiments, and finding novel protein designs that have eluded nature. The Huang Foundation is providing researchers the compute to expand the frontiers of medicine, while ensuring that the resulting models, data, and tools are openly available to all. “