With the rapid escalation of infection rates in the Corona virus inside the United States, especially in the states of New York and California, and the direction of things towards the explosion of infection rates in many other places, the United States government decided to call the supercomputers in the country to enter the front line with the virus, to work together In a supercomputer computing alliance, its mission is to accelerate and shorten the time needed to reach an effective virus medication.

And last week, it was announced that 16 computers of this type were linked together in one alliance, scientists were able to examine and test 8000 new pharmaceutical compounds in just two days, instead of three years, and they chose 77 promising compounds, entered the next cycle of development, amid optimism in a short time Access to medication.

The director of research at "IBM", owner of the supercomputer called "The Summit" and classified as the most powerful computer on the planet, Dr. Dario Gill, has published an article on the newsroom on the site "newsroom.ibm.com" , In which he presented some details about the American government summoning the country's supercomputers to work together to reach an effective drug for the virus in the shortest possible time.

"The alliance is made up of supercomputers at Lawrence Life More National Labs, Oak Oak Ridge National Labs, Argon National Labs, Sandia National Labs, Law Alamo National Labs, and National Corporation," Gill said. For Science, NASA, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Rensselaer Institute of Applied Arts, as well as supercomputers from a group of major companies, are (IBM), (Microsoft), (Google), (HP) and (Amazon) And others. To provide support to scientists, medical researchers and government agencies working to combat the virus, to come up with an effective drug within a short time.

809 thousand units

According to Jill, the High-Performance Computers Alliance provided a computing power of 809 thousand processing units, of which 775 thousand in the form of central processing units, and 34 thousand in the form of graphics processing units, which are huge computing resources that put between researchers and scientists an unprecedented processing power Up to 320 beta flop.

The "beta flop" is the standard used to estimate the efficiency and power of supercomputers of this type, and it means the computer's ability to execute "quadrillion" computer operations per second.

Organization and leadership

According to a report published by networkworld.com, which specializes in information network technologies and high-performance computing, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is the party that took the initiative towards forming this alliance, and it is currently coordinating between the various parties concerned, led by the Ministry of Energy and NASA »And the group of major national laboratories and giants, and the specific goal for all is to provide the necessary resources for scientists, medical researchers and agencies responsible for combating the virus, to shorten the time to reach an effective drug to the maximum extent possible.

Scientists at the National Oak Ridge labs, working side by side with the University of Tennessee and managing high-performance computing at IBM, estimated that tasks that were destined to take three years and months to develop the drug using traditional manual methods, by accreditation On regular servers, many of them could actually be accomplished in just two days, based on this tremendous ability of high-performance computing, tasks related to conducting massive quantities of hundreds of thousands of experiments, scenarios, and simulations, in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling calculations at the component level T. ultra-precision living cells, such as proteins and DNA of the virus, in its relationship with living human cells, and how to force them and influence.

Preliminary results

Researchers revealed some of the preliminary results of the research activities that took place on the new supercomputing alliance, including an experiment in which all biological and chemical information available on the virus was examined, reviewed and analyzed, its structure and activity, its strengths and weaknesses, how it attacks human cells, its behavior within the body, and its match With information about human cells, especially in terms of immunology, and in light of this a large number of scenarios and possible combinations were developed, they were reduced to 8000 formations, and in the next cycle of experiments, these potential combinations were examined and evaluated, and the examination ended with the choice of 77 Geniculum only.

Simulation results

The professor of biophysics at the University of Tennessee, Dr. Jeremy Smith, emphasized that the giant "IBM" supercomputer, as well as the Oak Ridge laboratory, were necessary to get the simulation results that the team needed very quickly, instead of getting On these results during three years by manual means, and during several months on regular computers, it was possible to obtain them within only two days, but he stressed that these results do not mean that a treatment for the virus has been reached, but they are results that make us very optimistic.

Starting point

Professor Jeremy Smith, Professor of Biophysics at the University of Tennessee, said that the giant “IBM” computer called the “Summit”, in cooperation with the supercomputer of the National Oak Ridge labs, provided the necessary support to the team in the production, testing and evaluation process The 8,000 compounds that were proposed, based on information related to the "secret protein", a super-tiny piece of the Corona virus, would likely make the virus unable to infect host cells in the human body, which is a starting point toward an effective treatment that works to Close the port from which the Coronavirus enters the host cell.

This hypothesis is based on the findings of Chinese researchers regarding the sequence of the virus, and they discovered that it infects the body with one of the mechanisms of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which spread in 26 countries during the spread of the SARS epidemic in 2003, and this similarity between the two SARS structures And «Corona», facilitated reaching a starting point in the study of «Corona», where the research team assumed that both «SARS» and «Corona» do «docking» inside the living cell in the same way.

Accordingly, a mathematical model was built to generate thousands of drug compositions that can proceed towards using this protein in the formation of a drug that prevents "corona" from entering the human cell.