The Fastest Supercomputer on Earth Is Being Deployed Against Coronavirus

[Xipe Totec]

The US Department of Energy has announced that the Summit supercomputer will be used to attempt to find a treatment or cure for Covid-19, also known as coronavirus. Summit is a 10KW machine built with 4,608 processing nodes. Each node contains 2x Power9 CPUs at 3.07GHz and six Nvidia Volta V100 GPUs. It’s the fastest supercomputer on Earth, with a demonstrated performance of 148.6 petaFLOPS in Linpack and peak performance of over 200 petaFLOPS.

The reason the DoE is tapping the world’s fastest supercomputer for the project is that trying to find methods of inhibiting or attacking a virus is a computationally taxing problem. IBM writes:

When trying to understand new biological compounds, like viruses, researchers in wet labs grow the micro-organism and see how it reacts in real-life to the introduction of new compounds, but this can be a slow process without computers that can perform digital simulations to narrow down the range of potential variables, but even then there are challenges. Computer simulations can examine how different variables react with different viruses, but when each of these individual variables can be comprised of millions or even billions of unique pieces of data and compounded with the need to be run multiple simulations, this can quickly become a very time-intensive process using commodity hardware.

https://medium.com/extremetech-access/the-fastest-supercomputer-on-earth-is-being-deployed-against-coronavirus-1b61d25a8e55


The video below summarizes the work scientists have done using Summit. Thanks to the supercomputer, researchers screened 8,000 compounds in a matter of days and identified 77 potentially beneficial small-molecule compounds that show evidence of inhibiting Covid-19.

[lapfog_1]

1. pretty sure the authors meant 10MW

not KW.

And the web site with the specs say 13MW...

https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/summit/

4,608 nodes, each node as 2 Power9 CPUs and 6 Nvidia Volta GPUs.

And it has been employed on this task for a few weeks now.

[customerserviceguy]

2. I hope

they've got a good antivirus program.

[cojoel]

4. lmao

[lastlib]

3. I'm reminded of a cartoon I saw back in the 70s---

(wish I could've saved it!)

Two men in lab coats looking at a massive computer print-out, with ginormous computer banks around them; one says, "Do you realize that it would take ten thousand mathematicians, working around the clock, FIFTY YEARS to make a mistake this big??!?"

[eppur_se_muova]

5. That sounds like it would be a Sydney Harris cartoon ... but I don't know that for sure. nt

[Javaman]

6. suddenly, I'm okay with robots taking over the earth.

I'd like to personally welcome our future robotic overlords.