Supercomputers have joined the fight against the coronavirus. IBM, in collaboration with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Department of Energy, has introduced the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium with the goal of leveraging supercomputers to study the virus.
Leading tech companies, including Google, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft, are also part of this consortium.
Supercomputers, whether owned by tech giants, government entities, or research institutions, have the capacity to conduct intricate experiments significantly faster than conventional computers and even human brains.
These machines are also physically massive, exemplified by "Frontier," a supercomputer housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. When completed in 2021, it will rank as the world's most powerful supercomputer, weighing over 1 million pounds and occupying the space of two basketball courts.
Researchers whose proposals are accepted by the consortium will gain access to the computing capabilities of 16 supercomputers located across the United States.
Coronavirus research initiatives utilizing supercomputers are already in progress. IBM, with its "Summit" machine, dubbed "the most powerful supercomputer on the planet," has been instrumental in aiding researchers in identifying molecular compounds that exhibit the most potential for binding to and neutralizing the spikes used by the coronavirus to infect healthy cells.
"They were able to recommend 77 promising small-molecule drug compounds that can now undergo experimental testing," states IBM's announcement regarding the initiative. "This illustrates the power of accelerating discovery through computational analysis."
Other members of the consortium include MIT, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, various Department of Energy national laboratories (many of which house the supercomputers), NASA, and the National Science Foundation.
Even as people across cities and countries stay at home to combat the coronavirus, it's reassuring to know that the world's most brilliant minds, both human and machine, are dedicated to the cause.