The Pentagon's newest toy isn't a fancy war machine—it's a combined supercomputer and rapid response laboratory (RRL) dedicated to bolstering America's biological defenses.
Exascale Matrix Factorization: Using Supercomputers and Machine Learning for Drug Discovery
Located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, the new machine, built in collaboration with the National Nuclear Security Agency, will share the same architecture as LLNL's upcoming El Capitan exascale supercomputer, with its AMD MI300A APUs.
Specifics about the system's hardware, and whether it will use existing drug discovery algorithms or government-developed ones, were not shared.
It will be used to advance both military and civilian defense against biological threats using large-scale simulations, AI modelling, threat classification and, with the combination of a new RRL, to accelerate the development of medical countermeasures.
