Co-hosted by HPC centers in Singapore, Japan, Australia, SupercomputingAsia (SCA) 2022 is an annual conference encompassing a range of notable supercomputing events in Asia held from March 1-3, 2022. It was this event that SingHealth, the National Supercomputing Center Singapore (NSCC) and NVIDIA chose to announce their partnership to support advanced healthcare research at SingHealth.
Last December, the National Supercomputing Centre Singapor (NSCC) had announced that it had signed a collaboration agreement with the National University Health System (NUHS) to build a national petascale supercomputing infrastructure named “Prescience” to meet Singapore’s medical research and healthcare needs by the middle of next year. The construction of a second supercomputer by NSCC with Singhealth, installed on the latter’s campus, is one of the goals of this latest partnership announced at SCA 2022. For its part, Nvidia will contribute its AI expertise via its pre-trained HPC-enabled artificial intelligence models and advanced software. Dr. Janil Puthucheary, Minister of State for Communications and Information, Health, and Minister in charge of GovTech, guest of honor at the SCA22 conference, said:
“These public-private partnerships dependent on the entire value chain of infrastructure, software, digital tools and researchers accelerate scientific outcomes and, in this case, will support Singapore’s health and medical services. The NSCC, SingHealth and NVIDIA agreements deepen the collaboration and open up many more opportunities in other areas of medicine beyond the initial use cases.”
The partners will be able to take advantage of NSCC’s “Supercomputing Digital Sandbox,” which will make it easier for researchers not trained in HPC to use NSCC’s supercomputer. This will give SingHealth the opportunity to accelerate its ongoing medical research and innovation projects.
Supporting Singhealth’s AI program
Globally, algorithms are being trained to detect heart attack risk . One of the projects of the partnership is to support SingHealth’s AI program, which aims to develop AI algorithms for the intelligent triage of patients with cardiovascular disease. Using megadata including clinical data, chest X-rays and retinal images of patients with symptoms of cardiovascular disease, AI algorithms are designed to predict a patient’s risk of adverse cardiac events and perform appropriate triage. In this way, AI allows cardiologists to prioritize patients with heart problems or identify patients at high risk for coronary artery disease in the outpatient setting. Professor Kenneth Kwek, Group Deputy CEO (Innovation and Informatics), SingHealt said:
“The adoption of emerging technologies is a game changer in helping us improve care delivery and optimize healthcare resources in the interest of improving clinical outcomes and patient experience. Through this collaboration with NSCC and NVIDIA, passionate supercomputers and specialized software for AI and deep learning will be made readily available and accessible to our colleagues to help them conduct groundbreaking research and develop new innovations that will transform and shape the future of healthcare.”
In addition to healthcare, the partnership will support a variety of research in other areas such as climate science and data center operations. Dennis Ang, senior director, Enterprise Business, ASEAN and ANZ Region at Nvidia, concludes:
“From weather spies to life sciences, NVIDIA’s accelerated computing and software powers many of the world’s fastest supercomputers and HPC systems, giving researchers the power they need for scientific breakthroughs. Our collaboration with NSCC and SingHealth has helped expand research and innovation in healthcare, as well as other key areas related to climate research and digital twin simulation in Singapore.”
