Supercomputer Summit found 77 potential drugs for coronavirus treatment
Scientists and researchers from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory asked IBM‘s huge supercomputer Summit, which drugs could be effective to stop COVID-19. The results were published in ChemRxiv magazine and, using an algorithm, determined that Summit is the known 77 drug that can stop the virus from advancing its protein. Thanks to these drugs, the spread of COVID-19 can be stopped.
Supercomputer Summit found 77 potential drugs for coronavirus treatment
Supercomputer Summit started the research with 8,000 drugs and this number has been reduced to 77 islands. It also ordered the drugs according to how effective they would be against the virus. “We needed to get the simulation results we needed quickly,” said co-author of the research, Jeremy Smith. With Summit, this took a day or two, it would take months on a regular computer. Of course, these results do not mean that we have found a cure for coronavirus.”
“However, we are very hopeful that our calculation findings will both inform future studies and provide a framework that researchers will use to further address these compounds. Only then will we know if any of these are showing the necessary properties to reduce or treat this virus.”
Researchers were able to identify the most effective compounds to combat COVID-19. They will be able to develop an effective vaccine without wasting time trying out unknown compounds.
What is the IBM Summit?
Summit or OLCF-4 is the world’s fastest supercomputer, developed by IBM for use in Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and with a capacity of 200 petaFLOPS since November 2019. The current LINPACK comparison is set to 148.6 petaFLOPS. As of November 2019, the supercomputer is also the highest energy-efficient computer in the world, with measured power efficiency of 14,668 gigaFLOPS/watts. Summit is the first supercomputer to reach an exaop speed of 1.88 exaop (one quintillion process per second) and is expected to reach 3.3 exaops using mixed sensitivity calculations.
Supercomputer IBM Summit Specifications
- Application Performance: 200 PF
- Number of Nodes: 4.608
- Node performance: 42 TF
- Memory Per Node: 512GB DDR4 + 96GB HBM2
- NV memory per node: 1600GB
- Total System Memory: 10 PB DDR4 + HBM2 + Non Volatile
- Processors2 IBM POWER9 ™ 9,216 CPU
- 6 NVIDIA Volta GPU: 27,648
- File System: 250 PB, 2.5 TB / s, GPFS ™
- Power Consumption: 13 MW
- Connection: Mellanox EDR 100G InfiniBand
- Operating System: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 7.4
Will Supercomputer Summit save us?
