Constructed with over 1,000 NVIDIA Blackwell Extremely GPUs, LillyPod is now on-line to energy scientific analysis and supercharge the way forward for drugs.
Saving and bettering lives — that the majority human endeavor — simply received a super-computational increase.
Lilly this week launched probably the most highly effective AI manufacturing unit wholly owned and operated by a pharmaceutical firm to assist its groups make significant medical developments sooner, extra precisely and at unprecedented scale. Dubbed LillyPod, it’s the world’s first NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with DGX B300 methods.
Powered by a DGX SuperPOD with 1,016 NVIDIA Blackwell Extremely GPUs, Lilly’s AI manufacturing unit delivers greater than 9,000 petaflops of AI efficiency. It was assembled in simply 4 months.
LillyPod was inaugurated Wednesday at a ribbon-cutting in Indianapolis.
“It’s a giant day for us with the supercomputer approaching board, however it’s a day 150 years within the making,” mentioned Diogo Rau, govt vice chairman and chief info and digital officer at Lilly. “LillyPod is a strong image of who we’re and why we do that work: to make life higher for folks all over the world. We’re, proper right here, proper now, on the proper second to advance biology in a approach that has simply by no means been completed earlier than.”
Step Behind the Scenes of the LillyPod
Computational energy that after required 7 million Cray supercomputers now matches inside a single NVIDIA GPU — and LillyPod accommodates greater than 1,000 of them. This infrastructure permits Lilly’s genomics staff to harness 700 terabytes of information utilizing over 290 terabytes of high-bandwidth GPU reminiscence.
“Computation is on the coronary heart of biology and it’s on the coronary heart of science,” mentioned Thomas Fuchs, senior vice chairman and chief AI officer at Lilly. “Having the ability to compute at scale shouldn’t be one thing non-compulsory for an organization like ours, it’s completely mandatory. So we’re constructing the computational future of drugs and also you see that in all areas alongside the pharmaceutical worth chain.”
Lilly’s AI manufacturing unit is about to help the large-scale coaching of protein diffusion fashions, small-molecule graph neural community fashions and genomics basis fashions.
NVIDIA’s full-stack AI manufacturing unit structure supplied with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD — together with accelerated computing, NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking and optimized AI software program — supplies a safe, scalable platform for the extremely regulated workflows of healthcare and life sciences.
NVIDIA Mission Management software program permits Lilly to handle its DGX SuperPOD, orchestrate workloads, monitor efficiency and automate AI operations securely and effectively.
The supercomputer’s practically 5,000 connections are constructed with greater than 1,000 kilos of fiber cables. Lilly goals for its new AI supercomputing infrastructure to run on 100% renewable electrical energy by 2030, utilizing environment friendly liquid cooling and minimal incremental vitality influence.
Advancing Basis Fashions, Bodily and Agentic AI
LillyPod is greater than a device — it’s a brand new scientific instrument that brings collectively proprietary knowledge and superior AI fashions.
With this basis, Lilly groups can analyze genomes, discover billions of chemical prospects and apply AI throughout medical growth and manufacturing to design higher trials, optimize manufacturing and speed up determination‑making. Collectively, these capabilities allow sooner, extra exact and extra scalable creation and supply of medicines.
“LillyPod will usher in a brand new period of AI-driven drug discovery,” mentioned Tim Coleman, senior vice chairman and chief know-how officer at Lilly. “We imagine that computation is foundational to science and that Lilly sufferers deserve each benefit that we may give them.”
Choose fashions can be made out there by Lilly TuneLab, an AI and machine studying platform that gives biotech firms with entry to drug discovery fashions constructed on proprietary Lilly knowledge generated at a price of over $1 billion.
As the primary drug discovery platform with plans to supply each Lilly fashions and NVIDIA BioNeMo open basis fashions for healthcare and life sciences, TuneLab makes use of a federated studying infrastructure constructed on NVIDIA FLARE, which permits biotech firms to faucet into highly effective proprietary AI fashions whereas retaining their knowledge personal and separate from different customers. As extra firms take part, the fashions enhance, benefitting all customers and additional increasing AI entry for the biotech ecosystem.
Traditionally, drug discovery has been constrained by the bodily limits of the moist lab. Even extremely productive groups can usually analyze roughly 2,000 molecular concepts per goal per 12 months, as a result of every experiment requires bodily synthesis and testing.
“Now the supercomputer heart primarily simply breaks the bodily restrict [of the wet lab],” mentioned Yue Wang Webster, vice chairman of analysis and growth informatics at Lilly. “Now within the dry lab, you’ll be able to take a look at billions of molecule concepts at your fingertips.”
LillyPod removes this constraint by making a computational dry lab at large scale, the place scientists can simulate and consider billions of molecular hypotheses in parallel earlier than committing to bodily experiments.
With its inside AI platforms, Lilly workers may use LillyPod to construct chatbots, agentic workflows and analysis lab brokers with out reinventing the wheel.
By combining science, knowledge and compute energy, Lilly and NVIDIA are breaking new floor for AI in life sciences.
“This machine is strictly how AI ought to be used,” mentioned Fuchs. “It ought to be used for science. It ought to be used to minimize struggling and enhance the human situation.”
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Be taught extra about Lilly’s collaboration with NVIDIA on this AI manufacturing unit and an upcoming co-innovation AI lab.
