Recursion Announces Completion of NVIDIA-Powered BioHive-2, the Largest Supercomputer in Pharmaceutical Industry

BioHive-2, an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with NVIDIA DGX H100 systems, ranked #35 in the TOP500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world across all industries as of May 2024.

SALT LAKE CITY, May 13, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX), a leading clinical stage TechBio company decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery, today announced the completion of BioHive-2, Recursion’s new NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD AI supercomputer, powered by 63 DGX H100 systems with a total of 504 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs interconnected by NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking. This NVIDIA-powered AI supercomputer results in four times faster speeds than Recursion’s original supercomputer, BioHive-1, in benchmark performance tests. Based on available data, BioHive-2 is the fastest supercomputer wholly owned and operated by any pharmaceutical company worldwide.

"Scaled data generation paired with scaled computation is required to leverage AI in a space as vast and complex as biology,” said Ben Mabey, Chief Technology Officer at Recursion. “Recursion has spent the last decade generating and aggregating one of the largest biological and chemical datasets in the world, purpose-built for training new AI models. With BioHive-2 now online, we have significantly more computational horsepower to accelerate our use of our ever-growing dataset, extending our ability to train larger and more generalizable foundation models and AI agents to industrialize our drug discovery efforts.”

Recursion has demonstrated the importance of scaled computation by developing groundbreaking new foundation models like Phenom-1, a deep-learning model designed to extract biologically meaningful features from images of cells. As Recursion increased the size of the training data and the number of model parameters, the model’s performance increased, demonstrating a need for ample compute to train larger models. The experimentation and training to produce Phenom-1 required several months of computational time on BioHive-1. With BioHive-2, multiple ambitious AI projects of similar or greater size could be executed in parallel in shorter timeframes, enabling both the Recursion and Valence Labs teams to push on the frontier of AI in drug discovery and unlock the latent value of Recursion’s data.