The medical informatics market is the one in which NVIDIA has developed the most in recent years and where its advances in artificial intelligence have enabled it to become one of the largest suppliers of technologies in this field, Clara AGX being the bet of those of Jensen Huang in said market. It is therefore a workstation designed for scientific computing, but mainly oriented towards the most lucrative and interesting market in the scientific world, such as medicine.
What is Clara AGX?
Clara AGX is a PC that combines NVIDIA Tegra SoCs with graphics cards from the same brand in a single machine. They are therefore from a certain point of view an adaptation to medical computing of the Drive PX for autonomous vehicles.
After the Tegra fiasco on the tablet and mobile market, everyone knows that they have decided to direct them towards other markets, in particular to take advantage of the shift of the GeForce creators towards the artificial intelligence market. Which allowed them to set foot in two different industries of great importance. The first of these is the growing market for automated driving. The second, on the other hand, is linked to the huge health market, which includes several applications: from the capture of medical information through tomography to the synthesis of proteins for the creation of new drugs.
The biggest change that NVIDIA made to their Tegra from that point on was the inclusion of a PCI Express interface, this allowed them to connect a graphics card and optimize the joint launch of both parties. Thus, they make sure to give their platforms like Clara AGX a capacity for interaction between the two parties that is not possible on PC, the most relevant being the use of a completely unified memory space in terms of addressing. That is to say 100% consistent.
What’s inside a Clara AGX unit?
Each Clara AGX workstation is made up of the following components:
- State-of-the-art NVIDIA Tegra SoC. In the first version of the Clara AGX, it was a Xavier, but it has been updated with the most recent architecture which is Orin.
- An NVIDIA graphics card aimed at the professional market. Currently, they are using NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 GPUs with Turing architecture, equivalent to an RTX 2080 Ti. They currently offer an A6000 with the same capabilities as an RTX 3090.
- An NVIDIA ConnectX network card with a SmartNIC, allowing it to communicate with other units. It has two network ports, one at 100 Gbps of the QSFP28 type and another RJ45 or Ethernet at 10 Gbps.
- Two PCIe Gen 4 interfaces with 2 lanes each.
- 250 GB of storage in NVMe SSD format
Designed for AI and real-time computing
On the other hand, as many of you may have deduced, the operating system used in Clara AGX is not Windows, but a GNU/Linux distribution for ARM optimized for its hardware and with libraries and applications widely used in medical informatics. That’s why the Clara AGX is not a classic PC, but rather a workstation for creating real-time medical applications.
But what does real time mean? Refers to applications where interrupt requests to the CPU are executed at the time the interrupt is generated. Thus, the way they are handled by the operating system is different from the way it is traditionally done. They share this change with the Drive PX platform, where rapid response to information captured by sensors and user interaction are crucial for safety.
Although its main application is to take advantage of the AI-optimized hardware of current Tegra SoCs and GPUs, especially units such as the NVDLA or Tensor Cores, for the development of AI models and algorithms. The system also provides a series of applications and models pre-trained and with versions of applications from the scientific world optimized for the hardware that Clara AGX integrates by NVIDIA itself.
Why is AI important in medicine?
The diagnosis of diseases is made by doctors from information based on the presence or absence of certain symptoms in the patient. In some cases, the symptoms can be read through the information that has been obtained visually. For example, something that seems innocuous to the patient, such as a small spot on the skin, may indicate something more serious.
One of the things we train AI systems with is learning to draw conclusions from visual information. This allows them to make predictions from training with medical images and inference algorithms about the state of health of different tissues, which will have been obtained from different devices used for diagnosis. Concretely, NVIDIA has oriented its Clara AGX towards radiology diagnostics, but has found its use in other medical applications, such as the study of the development of different tumours.
This does not mean that the Clara AGX ends up replacing medical professionals, because NVIDIA itself is the one who makes it very clear that it is not a device for diagnosing diseases and a great tool information classification in the form of millions of data that reach a hospital or medical center each year. In the same way, it can also be used for other areas of scientific research that can benefit from the CUDA ecosystem.
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