US ties up with IBM, Amazon, Google to use 16 supercomputers for coronavirus research

Computing major IBM and america government have partnered together and also other technology companies and universities to provide 16 supercomputers for research on drugs and vaccines to fight the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak.

On Sunday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced it had been setting up a higher Performance Computing Consortium, which comprises the united states Energy Department’s national laboratories, together with IBM, Alphabet’s Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and many universities.

The consortium will evaluate proposals from researchers (government, private companies and academia) and select the most promising kinds for usage of the supercomputers.

Among the 16 machines that the researchers could have free, remote usage of will be the IBM Summit, located at Oak Ridge National Library and the IBM Lassen at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, government laboratories in america.

Supercomputers have a large number of processors that interact to execute calculations, run experiments and analyse data using artificial intelligence. Also, they are especially best for conducting research in areas like epidemiology and molecular modeling for the reason that systems mirror the interconnectivity that exists in nature, Director of IBM Research Dario Gil was quoted as saying in america media.

Earlier last week, researchers released a lot more than 29,000 articles about COVID-19 and related viruses for professionals in Artificial Intelligence to draw insights from. It has since been downloaded 18,000 times by researchers, a US government official was quoted as saying.

An early on project in COVID-19 research on the IBM's Summit screened 8,000 compounds and recognized 77 of them which were probably to bind to the primary "spike" protein in the coronavirus SARS-CoV2 which in turn causes the COVID-19 infection. Spike proteins (the pointy structures seen on images of the coronavirus) will be the ones that attach to cells in the body. Now, further research can give attention to preventing those 77 compounds from attaching to host cells.

This could bring about potential treatments for deadly infection.