IBM's most powerful Summit supercomputer has joined the fight against coronavirus.
Housed at the United States Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), (after being built at IBM's laboratory), the Summit supercomputer's primary task is to solve difficult problems in the fields of energy, human health, and artificial intelligence.
The coronavirus disease forced researchers to use the supercomputer to study the virus. Thanks to its systems, researchers were able to carry out simulations with an “unprecedented speed”. The results appeared within one to two days. If “conventional” computing systems , it could take months.
Through this work, the researchers identified 77 small molecular weight drug compounds, which, according to ORNL, will be further studied to treat the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which is responsible for the COVID-19 disease epidemic.
The supercomputer was able to simulate over 8,000 compounds to detect those that most likely bind to the coronavirus spike protein, rendering it incapable of infecting host cells.
ORNL said the idea behind this is to study the entry point of the coronavirus into the host cell.
University of Tennessee (UT)/ORNL CMB researcher Micholas Smith created a model of the "spike protein," called S-protein , based on early studies of the structure.
He used a simulation code to conduct molecular dynamics simulations, which analyze the movements of atoms and particles in the protein.
Smith was able to simulate different compounds that attach to the coronavirus' S-protein spike to see if any of them could prevent the protein from sticking to human cells.
“Our results do not mean that we have found a cure for Wuhan coronavirus disease,” said Jeremy Smith, president of the University of Tennessee and director of the Center for Molecular Biophysics.
"However, we believe that our computational findings will help inform future studies and provide a framework for researchers to further investigate these compounds. Only then will we know if any of them exhibit the characteristics needed to mitigate the coronavirus."
The Summit supercomputer provided researchers with incredible data processing capacity, powered by 4,608 IBM Power Systems AC922 server nodes, equipped with two IBM POWER9 CPUs and six Nvidia Tensorcore V100 GPUs, delivering a peak performance of 200 petaflops.
Summit has also been used to help understand the origins of the universe, to show how humans could land on Mars, and more.
"Now, we've asked IBM engineers and experts to explore all options to help government and health agencies monitor and manage the coronavirus outbreak," said IBM CEO Ginni Rometty.
Beyond leveraging Summit, Rometty said IBM's Watson Health is working directly with organizations around the world to better understand the nature of the COVID-19 coronavirus.
"IBM's clinical development system has been made available - at no charge - to national health services to reduce the time and cost of clinical trials by providing data and analysis from devices that have internet access ," it said.
