The Supercomputer Battle Against COVID19

Supercomputers are powerful machines that are made of hundreds and in some cases thousands of processing units. Such computers have a very large storage capacity and provide high-speed computation.

As an engineer in Machine Learning and HPC (high performance computing), I was curious to see how these supercomputers would be used in the fight against COVID19.

To rapidly advance scientific research for treatment, the White House announced the launch of the COVID19 HPC Consortium. This Consortium included industry and academic giants in the field of HPC such as IBM, AWS, Nvidia, MIT, Argonne National Laboratory, etc .

So how were these tools used for COVID19? Engineers used supercomputers to identify drug compounds that neutralize the virus. Several simulations have been made to improve our knowledge on the interaction between the human cells and the protein strain of the virus. These simulations are essential to be able to simulate the virus behavior at the molecular level and thus contribute to the development of new treatments and preventive measures.

As of the 11th of May, 2020, researchers have been able to isolate 77 small molecule compounds from more than 8,000 initial molecules. The 77 remaining molecule compounds are likely to make the virus harmless for the host cell.

Amine