Dubbed as the world's most powerful supercomputer, IBM Summit is helping experts to combat the COVID-19 global outbreak. The supercomputer is reportedly given tasks that are crucial when it comes to identifying what chemicals or substances can be used to cure or even prevent the virus.
The COVID-19 Is a highly contagious virus that originated in China and so far, 115,000 people are confirmed to be a carrier of the virus. The fatality for this outbreak is also around 4,000, which encouraged the World Health Organization (WHO) and Google to issue an SOS alert.
Unreal Computing Prowess
Standard computers would usually perform tasks and give results after months, while on the other hand, the IBM Summit does everything and produces an output within one to two days. This speed increase is significant as it helps a lot of researchers and scientists to come up with a coronavirus cure.
As of the moment, researchers have easily identified 77 molecule compounds that will help with the search for the cure.
200 petaflops are IBM Summit's ultimate computing capability, which is super ahead when compared to regular computing machines.
To achieve such computing power, the team behind the computing beast equipped it with 4,608 server nodes. Each node has double IBM POWER9 CPU installed alongside several Nvidia Tensorcore V100 GPUs.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) hosts the IBM supercomputer. This massive leap in terms of computer power would stay relevant in our modern-day society as it would be a great help in research, AI, and even energy.
IBM Summit's Fight Against the Coronavirus
Thousands of simulations are being run on the machine. To identify a compound that would help with the formulation of the virus' cure.
Coronavirus strain has been the ability to travel from one host to another easily, is all thanks to its protein. The scientists are seeking compounds that would help out bind the protein out of the virus to prevent spreading.
Although the results that are being made are promising, Jeremy Smith, a Molecular Biophysicist, tells the public to suppress their expectations and don't let it loose. According to him, the results that they got from the IBM summit aren't exactly sure that would produce a cure yet. Still, they are hopeful that it will be useful to establish theoretical frameworks that would help with the cure progress.
Ginni Rometty, IBM's head, said that they are being approached by several government entities to help with the outbreak. With the rapid infections happening around the world, an immediate cure is needed to prevent more spreading and even fatalities.
She said that health agencies are also convincing them to help manage the outcome of the COVID-19 outbreak with the help of the supercomputer. IBM Summit could handle these tasks without fail.
The Clinical Development System made by IBM has been offered to the government for free to reduce the funds needed to combat the outbreak.
The system would get data from devices that are connected on the internet, which makes it a lot easier to manage and organize. Non-profit-organizations may also use the Operational Risk Insight tool.
