IBM has announced it will lend its supercomputing power to research groups fighting the novel coronavirus, also known as COVID-19.
IBM partnered with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Department of Energy to create the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium. This effort is expected to harness powerful high-performance computing, or “supercomputing,” resources that will massively increase the speed and capacity of coronavirus-related research.
“How can we find new treatments? Or ultimately vaccines and a cure?” Director of IBM Research Dario Gil asked in an interview with CNN Business. “Those are the areas we’ll be looking at … We’re going to bring an unprecedented amount of computing power” to address coronavirus.
The system will combine 16 supercomputing systems from IBM, national laboratories, several universities, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others. Computing power will be provided via remote access to researchers whose projects are approved by the consortium’s leadership board, which will be comprised of tech industry leaders and White House and Energy Department officials. The group plans to begin accepting research proposals through an online portal that will live Sunday evening.
The consortium will also connect researchers with top computational scientists to ensure the machines are used as efficiently and effectively as possible. The services and computing power will be provided for free to researchers.
“We’re bringing together expertise … even across competitors, to work on this,” Gil said. “We think it’s important to bring a sense of community and to bring science and capability against this goal. These systems are some of the most in-demand scientific and computational systems that we have.”
An early project by researchers at the University of Tennessee using IBM’s Summit supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Nashville has highlighted the potential for the technology.
Researchers used the supercomputer to screen 8,000 compounds to identify the 77 most likely to bind to the main “spike” protein in the coronavirus and render it incapable of attaching to host cells in the human body. Those 77 compounds can now be experimented on with the aim of developing a coronavirus treatment. The supercomputer, Gil said, made it possible to avoid the lengthy process of experimenting on all 8,000 of those compounds.
“This accelerates the process of discovery,” Gil said.
*Source: CNN