As COVID-19, more commonly known as coronavirus, continues to spread around the globe, technology is increasingly being looked to for solutions.
IBM’s Summit has now joined the fight, helping researchers to look for chemical compounds that could be effective against the virus.
Summit, or OLCF-4, is generally recognised as the world’s fastest supercomputer, with a maximum processing power of 200 petaFLOPS.
FLOPS stands for Floating Point Operations Per Second and is a measurement of how many operations per second a processor can achieve.
Summit holds the record of around 200 quadrillion calculations per second.
For context, that’s likely to be around 100 million times faster than the desktop PC or laptop you use at home or at work.
It works at speeds that were never before possible, opening up a whole new world of possibilities in AI and other areas.
The supercomputer has a lot of demands for its computational power, but coronavirus researchers were allowed to jump the queue and were designated computational time on the machine.
It was used to simulate thousands of molecular compounds to try to identify useful new combinations.
Specifically, it was looking for molecules that may be able to bind the protein that the virus uses to infect host cells.
It flagged up 77 such small-molecule compounds for further investigation, producing the results within one to two days.
Such a task would have taken months on standard computers and systems.
This is only the first step of any possible ‘cure’
Jeremy Smith, director of the ORNL Center for Molecular Biophysics, was pleased with the results but didn’t want to overplay the short-term impact.
‘Our results don’t mean that we have found a cure or treatment for the coronavirus,’ he said.
‘We are very hopeful, though, that our computational finding 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 characteristics needed to migrate this virus.’
Summit is certainly not the only technology being brought to bear on the coronavirus crisis.
Last week, we reported how Asian tech companies such as Alibaba were committing AI algorithms and other resources to combat the virus.
Delivery drones and sterilisation robots have also been deployed.
In Australia, a chatbot is fielding questions about the virus, and police in China have even been using thermal imaging goggles to look for signs of a fever.
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