IBM built Summit Against Coronavirus
Supercomputer Against Coronavirus
To fight against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19, IBM built Summit, the world’s most powerful and smartest supercomputer has being employed by the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to identify and study 77 small-molecule drugs compounds. Summit is powered by 27,000 NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs and 9,216 IBM Power9 CPUs.
At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, simulations of more than 8,000 compounds were performed to screen for those that are most likely to bind to the main “spike” protein of the coronavirus, rendering it unable to infect host cells, by two researchers using the Summit Supercomputer. The compounds which seemed to have value in the virus’s experimental studies were ranked by the duo. The results were published in the journal ChemRxiv.
As a series of national and international private supercomputing initiatives have kicked off in the last two weeks, this is certainly the high point in the undauntin
g fight against coronavirus.So far across the globe, there are other known and announced supercomputing initiatives against COVID-19:
1. Sierra Supercomputer deployed by Lawrence Livermore Lab in the US is the world’s second most powerful capable of doing more calculations in one second than a human could do in 31 billion years. Figuring out which antibodies could attack and neutralize the virus will be done by using the computing power of Sierra.
2. A Chinese company BGI has teamed up with Intel and Lenovo to offer a large high-performance computing cluster which is made use to process high-throughput data from a genome sequencing system developed by BGI.
3. The European Union has granted over €10m from Horizon 2020 to support the research into finding a cure for the coronavirus and has announced that its supercomputer centers stand ready to help researchers in their work to develop new treatments and vaccines.
4. The world’s 26th most powerful supercomputer, Artemis, by the UAE firm Group 42 (G42) is offered to develop solutions to tackle the coronavirus breakout. For the rapid vaccine development, the Artemis’ computing capacity is offered free of charge to nonprofit and academic organizations.
5. A distributed computing project run by Stanford University, Folding@Home, rather than using one big supercomputer, is a project initiated to fight the virus using the leftover processing resources collected from individuals to help researchers find a cure.
6. To help the scientists to find a cure to the coronavirus, Tencent has opened up its supercomputing facility in China.
Why supercomputers?
When a virus enters a host cell, it starts infecting by binding to the cells and uses a ‘spike’ to inject their genetic material into the host cell. In wet labs, researchers grow the micro-organism and observe its reacts in real-life when new compounds are introduced to understand how new viruses behave. However, this is a prolonged process. To narrow down the range of potential variables, using powerful computers that can perform digital simulations makes the process much faster. The way different variables react with different viruses can be examined by computer simulations. There can be billions of unique data points in each of these individual variables. If a conventional computing system is used, this can become a very long process as each of the data points are compounded with multiple simulations, hence, using a supercomputer gets the information within days, which otherwise would have taken months to complete.
IBM built Summit Against Coronavirus – Source
