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

Recursion recently 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.

A smaller model similar to Phenom-1, called Phenom-Beta, has been released for external use on the NVIDIA BioNeMo platform. The Phenom series is just one of several different models Recursion has developed to accelerate the drug discovery process using biological, chemical, and real-world patient data. Phenom-Beta is the first third-party model to be made available on the BioNeMo platform.

“Accelerated computing, combined with the power of generative AI, is propelling the pharmaceutical industry into a new, advanced era of drug discovery,” said Rory Kelleher, global head of business development for life sciences at NVIDIA. “BioHive-2, powered by NVIDIA DGX AI supercomputing, is poised to accelerate the development of additional industry-leading foundation models across biology, chemistry, and healthcare.”

Other achievements that relied on Recursion’s platform, powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing, include the massive protein-ligand interaction prediction dataset announced last year. Recursion predicted the protein target(s) for approximately 36 billion chemical compounds in the Enamine REAL Space. As a result of this significant computational accomplishment, Recursion and Enamine have formed a collaboration to generate enriched compound libraries for the global drug discovery industry.

Recursion is a clinical stage TechBio company leading the space by decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously expands one of the world’s largest proprietary biological, chemical and patient-centric datasets. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to distill from its dataset a collection of trillions of searchable relationships across biology and chemistry unconstrained by human bias. By commanding massive experimental scale — up to millions of wet lab experiments weekly — and massive computational scale — owning and operating one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, Recursion is uniting technology, biology, chemistry and patient-centric data to advance the future of medicine. Recursion is headquartered in Salt Lake City, where it is a founding member of BioHive, the Utah life sciences industry collective. Recursion also has offices in Toronto, Montreal and the San Francisco Bay Area. For more information, visit www.Recursion.com.