Following the White House’s appeal to the tech industry to support the fight against the Coronavirus Pandemic, IBM is putting its most powerful Summit supercomputer into battle order to accelerate the search for a cure.
Indeed, the U.S. government has announced the creation of the Covid-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, led by IBM and bringing together the U.S. Department of Energy, national research laboratories, NASA, Microsoft, HP, Google and Amazon.
The new consortium has announced that it will make available to the scientific community 16 supercomputers with a power of 330 petaflops, or the equivalent of 330 million billion calculations per second, located in the United States and used by the US Nuclear Safety Agency, the National Science Foundation, NASA and MIT.

Among these machines is Summit, the world’s most powerful supercomputer created by IBM, with 200 petaflops of computing power alone and an “AI brain” designed to solve these kinds of problems.
Summit has run simulations on 8,000 compounds, and found that 77 of them, ranked in order of potential effectiveness, would be likely to serve as the basis for a future cure. These calculations took two days, when they would have taken months or years of research on conventional computers.

The results will be made available to researchers who will submit their research papers on the virus. The consortium will decide on the successful applications and provide technical assistance to the laboratories.
Google and Amazon, which store the data, will make it available to scientists on their respective clouds.

M.D