Nvidia already made a big quantum splash this month with several announcements from the SC23 supercomputing event, but it is already back with more news, as Nvidia and SandboxAQ announced a collaboration under which the latter’s software will run on the former’s GPUs to simulate and predict chemical reactions for the purposes of drug discovery, battery design, green energy, and more.
SandboxAQ said it will use highly GPU-optimized tensor network methods run on up to 32 Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs to solve challenging problems in science and industries. SandboxAQ also plans to leverage Nvidia cuTENSOR and Nvidia cuQuantum software. Tensor networks increasingly are being used in the training and processing of large AI models. SandboxAQ also will provide technical recommendations on relevant NVIDIA offerings including cuTENSOR, cuTensorNet, Quantum Computing and CUDA libraries.
The announcement comes after Nvidia last week said the H100 GPU would be involved in chemical simulations and related work with chemical giant BASF. SandboxAQ also has been increasingly involved in such projects, and announced its own biopharma unit earlier this year.
“Simulation is one of the most promising future technological applications, and it’s already leaving its mark today,” said Eric Schmidt, Chairman of SandboxAQ. “Thanks to rapid advances in GPU hardware and quantum information science, we’re finally able to harness AI for more specialized applications that will have a profound impact on our world. SandboxAQ’s AI simulation capabilities, augmented with Nvidia accelerated computing and quantum platforms, will help enable the creation of new materials and chemical compounds that will transform industries and address some of the world’s biggest challenges.”
SandboxAQ CEO Jack D. Hidary added that quantum simulations will drive “a new wave of GPU use, powering previously unattainable insights about our physical world that go beyond what extractive or generative AI are capable of unlocking… This collaboration will have a significant impact on a broad range of industries such as healthcare, energy, construction, financial services and more.”
“Advances in quantum chemistry and molecular modeling require powerful accelerated computing platforms to predict complex chemical interactions that can present countless benefits to society,” said Tim Costa, director of high performance computing and quantum at Nvidia. “Nvidia’s collaboration with SandboxAQ will help equip scientists to make the next generation of breakthroughs in material science.”
Dan O’Shea has covered telecommunications and related topics including semiconductors, sensors, retail systems, digital payments and quantum computing/technology for over 25 years.