World’s Supercomputers To Unite Against Coronavirus

Photo Credit: IBM

IBM is lending a helping hand in the the global fight against the coronavirus pandemic. According to Dario Gil, Director of IBM Research, the tech giant is working closely with governments around the world to discover viable treatments and a cure for the virus.

Through its collaboration with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the U.S. Department of Energy and several others, IBM is is putting its high-end computers to work on helping the scientific and medical communities hasten their progress.

IBM says that it will help with the launch of the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. The benefits that these machines offer could dramatically improve the healthcare system and how medical communities respond to a virus outbreak.

The consortium consists of IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL), Argonne National Lab (ANL), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Sandia National Laboratory (SNL), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and several others.

This will effectively allow some of the most powerful supercomputers on earth to pool their resources together. In total the group comprises of 16 systems with more than 330 petaflops, 775,000 CPU cores, 34,000 GPUs.

IBM’s supercomputers can use their processing prowess to help researchers run very large numbers of calculations in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling. If done by hand, these experiments would take years to complete, or months with the use of slower traditional computers.

Credit: Micholas Smith/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy

A real world example of this is the work IBM’s supercomputer, Summit has been tasked with. Considered as one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, it is assisting researchers screen 8,000 compounds to find ones that will likely to bind to the main “spike” protein of the coronavirus.

So far, Summit has found 77 promising drug compounds that can now be experimentally tested for use in the real world. Not only can machines like Summit speed up the entire process, but they will allow researchers to focus their attention on more important aspects of their research.