Google Cloud: the platform for scientific discovery
Significant advancements in computing power have fundamentally reshaped the scientific process. Computational tools now enhance both theory and experimental processes, driving discoveries across all areas of science through numerical simulations and data analysis.
Our investments in foundational research, scalable infrastructure and artificial intelligence have supported and accelerated scientific progress. We have contributed to industry-leading advances in both science and computing, from new breakthroughs for drug discovery, weather forecasting and materials design, to high-performance infrastructure, cloud-scale software tools, and powerful generative AI models and assistants. Now we’re combining the best of Google DeepMind and Google Research with Google Cloud advanced infrastructure to further accelerate scientific breakthroughs, with a mission to become the most capable platform for global research and scientific discovery.
Today, we're introducing new supercomputing-class infrastructure and our first AI-powered science applications in Google Cloud towards fulfilling this mission and enabling more new discoveries.
Supercomputing infrastructure solutions for the hardest, most important scientific problems
Scientists use supercomputers to tackle the world’s most challenging compute- and data-intensive problems. Supercomputers are systems such as high performance computing (HPC) clusters that utilize powerful CPUs and often GPUs, like our recently announced A4 and A4X VMs. These resources deliver the massive performance needed for large-scale simulation, data analysis, and AI model training. Simplified access to supercomputing-class resources, HPC cluster software, and AI tools and applications has become vital for scientific discovery and AI innovation.
Today, we’re introducing H4D VMs, Google Cloud's most powerful CPU-based VMs, designed to enable new levels of performance for scientific applications. H4D VMs are built with the latest AMD CPUs and connected with advanced Titanium network acceleration. Together, these technologies allow scientists to deploy supercomputing-class HPC clusters and scale applications to thousands of processors to solve complex problems more rapidly and accurately. H4D VMs with Titanium network acceleration are available in preview now.
“This leap in computational capability will dramatically accelerate our pursuit of breakthrough therapeutics,” says Petros Koumoutsakos at Harvard University, “bringing us closer to effective precision therapies for blood vessel damage in heart disease."
To help overcome the challenges of designing, deploying and managing complex clusters, we introduced Cluster Toolkit, which provides simple, reliable and repeatable cluster deployments. Along with the Cluster Director (formerly Hypercompute Cluster), you can deploy and manage a large cluster as a single unit for improved performance, efficiency and resilience.
Scientific and AI applications often have extreme storage demands, and that’s why we’re also announcing Google Cloud Managed Lustre, a new high-performance, fully managed parallel file system built in collaboration with DDN and based on EXAScaler Lustre.
AI models for science, powered by Google
Our powerful infrastructure makes complex computations possible, and increasingly, it powers sophisticated AI models that augment traditional simulation methods to accelerate scientific discovery. Building on this, today we’re announcing our first AI-powered science applications offered on Google Cloud.
AlphaFold 3, developed by Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, can predict the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules with unprecedented accuracy. The new AlphaFold 3 High-Throughput Solution, available for non-commercial use and deployable via Google Cloud Cluster Toolkit, enables efficient batch processing of up to tens of thousands of sequences while minimizing cost through autoscaling infrastructure. “Having access to AlphaFold on Google Cloud can help our researchers rapidly predict and explore the structure and interactions of all biomolecule classes, accelerating our understanding of diseases," says Sumaiya Iqbal from Broad Institute Ladders to Cures.
WeatherNext AI models, from Google DeepMind and Google Research, enable fast, accurate weather forecasting. We’re introducing access to WeatherNext AI models via Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Model Garden, allowing customization and deployment of models for research and industry applications. With affordable, fast and accurate weather predictions, researchers can study far more scenarios, and organizations can better prepare for weather events and their impact.
Quicker ideas for faster scientific discovery
In addition to new infrastructure and AI-powered applications, we are announcing two new AI agents in Agentspace, which can help accelerate scientific research through rapid generation of new hypotheses to test.
Our Deep Research agent condenses hours of research, and can synthesize external and enterprise data to generate in-depth research reports; while the Idea Generation agent can help rapidly develop novel ideas and hypotheses for scientists to test. Both agents are available in preview.
Innovation for the future
Scientific discovery touches upon nearly every aspect of human existence — from shaping our understanding of the universe, to addressing global challenges, to fueling innovation across industries. The progress we’ve made today is another big step forward in our ongoing commitment to bringing new capabilities to scientists and researchers.
Scientists and researchers can get started right away with credits, training, and more via Google Cloud for Researchers. All who are interested in HPC, AI, and other advanced computing technologies are welcome to join the Google Cloud Advanced Computing Community to learn more about how the latest technologies in Google Cloud can help advance scientific research and discovery.