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IBM Supercomputer Identifies 77 Compounds That Could Fight Coronavirus

Ryan Whitwam on March 20, 2020

The Summit supercomputer came online several years ago with more computing power than any other non-distributed system. The US Department of Energy announced earlier this month that it would turn the system’s massive computing power toward the COVID-19 pandemic. The machine has been crunching the numbers, and it has now identified 77 chemical compounds that could help stop coronavirus.

Summit is the most powerful supercomputer on Earth by a wide margin, and it’s also the third most energy-efficient. It uses 10MW of power to keep its 9,216 POWER9 22-core CPUs and 27,648 Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs humming. It has a theoretical peak performance of over 200 petaflops and has demonstrated 148.6 petaflops in practice while operating at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The target of Summit’s massive computing power is a specific protein on the surface of the virus particle. Like other viruses, SARS-CoV-2 needs to infect cells to make copies of itself, and it does that with the help of the Spike protein. These molecules on the surface of the virus link to angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptors on human cells, allowing the virus to inject its genome and hijack cellular machinery.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/307998-ibm-supercomputer-identifies-77-compounds-that-could-fight-coronavirus?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=whatsnewnow&utm_medium=title