AMPD Signs Expanded Deal with Variational AI for ML Compute Employing NVIDIA GPUs
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, May 5, 2021 -- AMPD Ventures Inc. ("AMPD" or the "Company") is proud to announce that it has signed a deal with Variational AI Inc. ("Variational AI" or "Variational") to expand its machine learning infrastructure hosted at AMPD's DC1 sustainable data centre. Variational AI is discovering new small molecule therapeutics for COVID-19, cancer, and other disease areas, and needed to greatly increase its machine learning compute capacity. AMPD and Variational AI have signed a new 24-month contract that approximately triples Variational's machine learning compute capacity. AMPD views this deal as validation of AMPD's commitment to blending the convenience of cloud with the power of the high-performance computing architectures necessary for the latest cutting-edge applications.
AMPD, in conjunction with Variational and NVIDIA engineers, conducted precise engineering tests to architect a solution optimized specifically for the profile of the machine learning workload required by Variational. This expansion of the AMPD machine learning platform is one of the first practical outcomes of AMPD recently joining the NVIDIA Cloud Service Provider Partner program.
Graphics Processing Units ("GPU") are a critical component of high-performance computing for artificial intelligence and machine learning. While a Central Processing Unit ("CPU") is good at handling multiple tasks, GPUs are typically designed to handle a few specific tasks very fast in parallel. So far, these tasks have also included the mining of crypto currencies and processing the high-quality graphics of the latest 3D games. GPUs can also solve the complex math problems for machine learning better than traditional CPUs.
"Working with AMPD, we were able to test our workloads on various different types of physical GPUs as well as on instances of virtual GPUs," said Variational AI co-founder and CEO, Handol Kim. "What it all comes down to for Variational is finding a way to get optimal performance for value. The more compute horsepower we have, the faster we can train our models, see results, and generate novel molecules that can become efficacious drugs. AMPD took us through a process with the goal of finding out how best to architect a machine learning solution that fit our needs precisely and provided us with the best efficiency and cost effectiveness. In the end, it was the NVIDIA A40 Ampere class GPUs that hit the mark, and by building them into a platform that supports our networking and storage needs as well as a dense form factor with the right ratios of RAM and CPU cores, the AMPD machine learning solution is a clear winner on all fronts."
"Our recently announced Cloud Service Provider partnership with NVIDIA, together with our deploying the latest MI100 machine learning GPUs from AMD, amplify AMPD's commitment to catering to customers exploring the boundaries of artificial intelligence and deep learning." said Anthony Brown, CEO of AMPD Ventures Inc. "With both digital content creation and AI/machine learning requiring similar levels of high-performance compute centred around hosted high-end GPU-based solutions, I see AMPD continuing to invest in architecting solutions around this technology to meet the demand of our customers moving forward."
About AMPD Ventures Inc.
AMPD specializes in providing high-performance cloud and computing solutions for low-latency applications, including video games and eSports, digital animation and visual effects, and big data collection, analysis and visualization. Additional information about us is available on SEDAR and our website at http://ampd.tech.
About Variational AI
Variational AI uses state-of-the-art generative machine learning to discover novel, efficacious, safe, and synthesizable small molecules. Variational AI performs multi-property molecular optimization to dramatically reduce the time to discover high-quality drug-like molecules with a higher probability of success in clinical trials.
Source: AMPD Ventures Inc.
