From the time I get up in the morning
until the time I go to bed at night,
my days are filled
with COVID-19. So, yeah, I feel it.
I dream about it.
A few moments ago, the World Health Organization declared the virus
a global pandemic as the number of cases around the globe grows.
In their fight against COVID-19,
researchers are turning to the world's fastest supercomputers.
COVID-19.
Those spikes are the proteins that then inject
into the host cells and in fact then reproduce.
They wanted to figure out what small molecules
could then deactivate its functioning.
Comibining the world's most powerful computer
with coronavirus research
hit a chord.
So I actually sent an email around to my group
which just had one sentence in it:
And I
proceeded to just start
simulating the heck out of it.
Summit was that fast.
Like I could fly through this thing.
IBM had designed and built the top two supercomputers in the world:
Summit and Sierra.
The first thought was, well, why don't we make
computing capacity available,
right, to others.
Why not everybody?
I could tell things were getting more serious
and effectively in less than a week
we created the COVID-19
High Performance Computing Consortium.
We have members from industry,
from academia,
from national labs,
and U.S. government organizations all working together
to fight COVID-19.
I think it really
set a fire to the imagination of other people.
Two days later, the call came out.
The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium
is working with the White House and Department of Energy
to harness IBM's supercomputing prowess
to help stop the outbreak.
Within weeks of the consortium's launch
more than 90 research teams and partner organizations
had joined the race against the pandemic.
We see scientists across many domains
coming together, working together.
I'm a computational biophysicist.
I'm a cancer biologist.
I am a data scientist.
Assistant professor, biomedical sciences.
I am associate lab director.
This is completely uncharted territory
and we need to get almost near real-time sense
of the incidence of the disease.
Why does this virus
become this severe
compared to other coronaviruses that also infect
but don't lead to this degree of severity,
don't lead to this degree of mortality?
We see a lot of novelty here that we haven't seen with other viruses, and I think
that's something that we
currently exploring to see whether
there are unique Achilles Heels that we can exploit for therapies.
We think that targeting this particular protein
will have the biggest effect.
It could stop it from replicating
right in its tracks.
We have a lot of different molecules and a lot of different atoms interacting.
So the scale of the problem gets tremendously large very quickly.
I would need 400 laptops lined up
in order to carry out the kind of work that I need to do.
So, supercomputing is
absolutely essential.
Resources such as Summit
are critical, because they are allowing researchers
with data-intensive questions
to get answers in rapid time.
Every day, this cadence of new ideas. What can we do?
What can we roll out tomorrow?
We have already five target molecules
that seem to be very promising.
People just want results
and this has to be done very quickly.
With the machine learning, we can basically skip the first like 20 iterations
and go straight to something that's gonna give us a high hit.
We're using AI to accelerate searches through billions of compounds,
we're using AI to
improve the docking of molecules.
Just by being able to do this parrallely,
we hope that someone gets lucky.
I know that a lot of people are suffering from this, and
a lot more will.
It's also quite an inspiring time to be a scientist.