Webinar Highlights from Oak Ridge Lab “Using the world’s most powerful OpenPOWER/POWER9 based supercomputer to help fight against CoViD-19”

We had wonderful presentations from Dr. Bronson Messer ,Director of Science at Oak Ridge National Lab and Dr. Chekuri Choudary from IBM. More than 200 participants were part of the Webinar and very engaging 2 hours .

Dr Bronson's presentation highlighted the progress made by the teams that have used OLCF's Summit system - IBM Power9 system with NVIDIA V100 GPUs. He also talked about Summit system which gave the researchers its massive data processing capability, enabled by its 4,608 IBM Power Systems AC922 server nodes, each equipped with two IBM POWER9 CPUs and six Nvidia Tensorcore V100 GPUs, giving it a peak performance of 200 petaflops. He did share about supercomputer simulated more than 8,000 compounds to screen for those that are most likely to bind to the main "spike" protein of the coronavirus, rendering it unable to infect host cells. Slide deck as well as recorded sessions are included below.

Dr Chekuri's slides included here.

Recorded version of two sessions available in our OpenPOWER Academia youtube channel

I would like to thank Prof Arghya Das at Unviersity of Wisconsin - Platteville , presenters Dr Bronson Messer , Dr Chekuri Choudary and the audience for their support to deliver this webinar during this challenging time and hope it is useful to bring in new ideas to find cure for Covid19.

Update from Oak Ridge Lab

The world's fastest supercomputer identified chemicals that could stop coronavirus from spreading, a crucial step toward a vaccine

I have got some details recently from Oak Ridge lab ..

The novel Wuhan coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has been sequenced, and the virus shares substantial similarity with SARS-CoV. Here, using a computational model of the spike protein (S-protein) of SARS-CoV-2 interacting with the human ACE2 receptor, we make use of the world's most powerful supercomputer, SUMMIT, to enact an ensemble docking virtual high-throughput screening campaign and identify small-molecules which bind to either the isolated Viral S-protein at its host receptor region or to the S protein-human ACE2 interface. We hypothesize the identified small-molecules may be repurposed to limit viral recognition of host cells and/or disrupt host-virus interactions. A ranked list of compounds is given that can be tested experimentally

Read more about this using the following paper submitted by Oak Ridge team

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, have used Summit, the worlds most powerful and smartest AI and HPC supercomputer built by IBM using Power 9 systems, to identify the molecules that may help us further understand, the coronavirus. By running multiple simulations they have built the model of the coronavirus’s protein structure. They have not necessarily found the cure yet but this will help to study the virus much better. Summit was the system used to make this happen and also Jeremy Smith, Governor’s Chair at the University of Tennessee and director of the UT/ORNL Center for Molecular Biophysics said that “Summit was needed to rapidly get the simulation results we needed. It took us a day or two whereas it would have taken months on a normal computer.” For more details about this research, do read the below article from Oak Ridge National Lab.

For detailed info about Power 9 systems and its features