Fujifilm Is First in Japan to Adopt NVIDIA DGX-2 Supercomputer

System to accelerate R&D in AI for healthcare and highly functional materials for displays and more.
by Abdul Hamid Halabi

FUJIFILM Corporation is the first company in Japan to adopt the NVIDIA DGX-2 AI supercomputer, which it will use to accelerate the development of AI technology for fields such as healthcare and medical imaging systems and its highly functional materials for displays and more.

Fujifilm is implementing a new supercomputer cluster consisting of multiple DGX-2 systems. Each system incorporates 16 NVIDIA Tesla V100 Tensor Core GPUs connected via NVIDIA NVSwitch, a revolutionary AI network fabric, which delivers throughput of 2.4TB per second.

DGX-2 is designed to enable the rapid development, testing, deployment and scaling of new deep learning models. Fujifilm will use the systems to accelerate AI research meant to push the frontiers of healthcare and a wide range of other fields.

“Improving the accuracy and delivery of medical care is one of society’s greatest challenges,” said Masataka Osaki, Japan country manager and vice president of Worldwide Field Operations at NVIDIA. “Combining Fujifilm’s expertise in medical imaging systems with NVIDIA’s AI leadership will supercharge the development and deployment of breakthrough applications for intelligent medical imaging systems.”

Akira Yoda, chief digital officer of FUJIFILM Corporation, said: “Fujifilm applies AI in a wide range of fields. In healthcare, multiple NVIDIA GPUs will deliver high-speed computation to develop AI supporting image diagnostics. The introduction of this supercomputer will massively increase our processing power. We expect that AI learning that once took days to complete can now be completed within hours.”

Fujifilm is active in healthcare through pharmaceuticals, bioCDMO and regenerative medicine; and in medical systems through medical equipment and services incorporating technologies for analyzing and recognizing medical images. It also deploys simulations in its work developing highly functional materials, such as display materials and fine chemicals.