Giving the virus a big byte
The most powerful computer could help find a cure for Covid-19
You’ve stayed indoors, washed your hands, convinced yourself that you don’t touch your face that often. But this will only contain the virus. To destroy it, researchers are doing more than putting their heads together. This week, they pooled all their data — test results, lab studies, infection patterns — into the world’s smartest supercomputer, in the hopes of finding a cure.
The IBM Summit is not your average desktop. For one, it’s spread over 5,600 sq ft (roughly the size of two tennis courts) at a US Department of Energy laboratory in Tennessee. At 340 tonnes, it weighs more than a large aircraft. Its servers can do 200 quadrilthe lion calculations per second. Want to compete? If every human alive were to complete one calculation every second, it would still take us 305 days (and plenty of human errors).
But crucially, Summit runs through 25 GB of data per second between its nodes. It sifts through lakhs of abstract documents and data points and uses AI and deep learning to build simulation models.
For Covid-19 research, this is a blessing. The virus infects healthy cells by binding to them and ‘spiking’ their diseased genes into them. To find a cure, scientists typically grow the new virus in thousands of petri dishes, and then introduce various medicinal compounds to see how it reacts.
Summit speeds up the process without getting its hands dirty. It uses available knowledge of the virus and the compounds (essentially billions of data points) to digitally simulate those effects. At the Tennessee lab, two researchers were granted emergency computation time with Summit to simulate more than 8,000 compounds and try to find out which ones are most likely to attack and deactivate that ‘spiking’ function.
It’s the kind of experiment that would have taken two years in a lab. Summit buzzed it out in two days. It identified 77 potential smallmolecule solutions that could fight the virus. It’s not quite a cure — the compounds need to be studied and tested in the real world.
But it’s certainly turbocharged our side of the battle.
When Summit was switched on in 2018, it had twice the power of China’s TaihuLight, THE IBM SUMMIT USES AVAILABLE KNOWLEDGE OF THE VIRUS AND MEDICINAL COMPOUNDS (ESSENTIALLY BILLIONS OF DATA POINTS) TO DIGITALLY SIMULATE THE EFFECTS OF THE LATTER world’s smartest computer at the time. But Summit’s no stranger to healthcare problems. It’s helping study the cancer population across America, using text and images to find hidden relationships between genes, biological markers and environment. Another project studies cellular systems to find connections to Alzheimer’s, heart disease and opioid addiction, in a bid to identify better treatment plans and possibly even a cure.
There are grand problems too. Summit’s thinking about how stars live and die, how stardust spreads across the galaxy, and whether it’s feasible to land on Mars. But the human body remains a more complex and urgent mystery for now.
Other supercomputers around the world have lent computing power to the search for a coronavirus cure. IBM’s Watson (which once beat human contestants on the quiz show Jeopardy!) and Sierra, and computing clusters in China, the EU and UAE, are offering machines.
Is the virus of our time faster than the tech of our time? One way to find out is by staying indoors, keeping Covid-19 from racing ahead.