The American government and IBM will allow corona researchers access to 16 of the most powerful supercomputers in the world

Researchers from academia and government and private research institutes who are partners in the global effort to find a treatment for the corona virus will be able, starting next week, to submit research projects that require particularly high computing power in the field of epidemiology, bioinformatics and molecular models to the partnership examination. According to Dario Gil, director of IBM's research laboratories, the representatives of the partnership will approve the projects according to their feasibility and ability to advance the fight against the virus in the fastest way

IBM and the American government have established a partnership (consortium) that will give researchers from around the world access to at least 16 supercomputers, in order to help and speed up the discovery of vaccines or drug treatments to fight the corona virus. The partnership also includes the national laboratories of the US Department of Energy, including Sandia and Los Alamos, NASA, MIT, the National Science Foundation and other companies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

Supercomputers are computers that include thousands and sometimes even thousands of processors that work in parallel to perform calculations on a very large scale. They are particularly suitable for processing and analyzing huge amounts of information using artificial intelligence algorithms - challenges that "classical" computers would have difficulty dealing with or that the calculation would require many months. They are used in everyday life to solve computational problems and perform simulations in drug and medical treatment development processes, development and discovery of new materials, battery development and weather and energy simulations. Predicting positive and negative effects of specific drugs, for example, is a computationally complex problem because it requires simulation of the structure of the molecules and their chemical properties, and the effects on various physiological processes.

Researchers from academia and government and private research institutes who are partners in the global effort to find a treatment for the corona virus will be able, starting next week, to submit research projects that require particularly high computing power in the field of epidemiology, bioinformatics and molecular models to the partnership examination. According to Dario Gil, director of IBM's research laboratories, the representatives of the partnership will approve the projects according to their feasibility and ability to advance the fight against the virus in the fastest way. The purpose of the partnership is to provide researchers with the shared computing resources within days of project approval. "Ultimately we need a cure. In order to be able to deal with it, we have to speed up science," said Gil. "We act with a sense of extreme urgency."

The computers on which the research will be conducted include two of the most powerful supercomputers in the world made by IBM - one is Summit located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the other is Lassen located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). According to Gil, along with another 14 computer systems, the researchers will have at their disposal a computing power of over 265 petaflops with 775 thousand cores and over 34 thousand graphic processing units.

Last week it was reported that the world's most powerful supercomputer, Summit, allowed researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee to examine about 8,000 medicinal compounds, and to filter out in a short time 77 compounds that have the highest potential to bind to the means of infection of the corona virus and prevent it from infecting host cells in the body

"I am proud to work with my colleagues from IBM and the extended scientific community to help in this effort," Gil wrote in a blog on the IBM website. "What started a few days ago with a single conversation with the White House for the Ministry of Science and Technology, quickly developed into an unprecedented effort that can make a real difference. In a time of uncertainty, I want to ensure that IBM does all it can to use our technology and expertise to make significant progress in this global struggle."