A few days ago, we at MGR Gaming brought you an article about the University of Washington designing a puzzle game to help research a cure for the Coronavirus or COVID-19.
It seems now that the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has decided they are going to contribute by bringing in the “Big guns”, in the form of “The Summit”, the world’s fastest supercomputer.
The Summit was created by IBM and employs 220,800 CPU cores, 188,416,000 CUDA cores, 9.2PB of memory, and 250PB of mixed NVRAM/storage.
The director of UT/ORNL CMB, Jeremy Smith said “Summit was needed to rapidly get the simulation results we needed. It took us a day or two whereas it would have taken months on a normal computer”. He continued on saying. “Our results don’t mean that we have found a cure or treatment for the Wuhan coronavirus. We are very hopeful, though, that our computational findings will both inform future studies and provide a framework that experimentalists will use to further investigate these compounds. Only then will we know whether any of them exhibit the characteristics needed to mitigate this virus.”
The Summit currently holds the number one spot as the most powerful computer in the world. It has 4,608 nodes, each containing two IBM Power9 CPUs and six Nvidia Volta GV100 GPUs.
The COVID-19 virus has proteins on its surface called “Spikes” which trick the ACE2 lung cell surface receptor into letting the virus into the cell and starting a viral infection.
Researchers are trying to stop the infection by blocking this protein residing on the virus therefore preventing the virus from binding to our cells, and thus rendering it unable to establish an infection.
Unfortunately, however these proteins come in an infinite amount of shapes and will take one very specific protein to bind to the spikes.
Micholas Smith from the University of Tennessee and ORNL, has said “We were able to design a thorough computational model based on information that has only recently been published in the literature on this virus,”
Smith and his colleagues are simulating over 8000 different protein compounds and their ability to bind to the spikes. Summit is able to achieve this in mere days compared to other computers taking months.
Smith has found 77 different small-molecule drug compounds up to now that warrant further investigation.
Once a protein is found that adheres to the spikes with a high success rate it can be synthesized into a vaccine.
Well it seems to us that there are many minds hard at work using all the tools they can find to help combat this virus and save many lives. Let’s be hopeful that a vaccine and cure are found soon.