The COVID-19 HPC Consortium, a public-private effort delivering free access to HPC processing for scientists pursuing coronavirus research some utilizing AI-based techniques has expanded to more than 56 research teams and extended to supercomputing centers and programs in Europe.

IBM, which in March helped form the consortium with the White House Office of Science & Technology and the U.S. Department of Energy, has issued an update on the programs growth and on its research work. Members ofPRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, have pledged to lend their supercomputing platforms to the effort, including the Swiss National Supercomputing CentresPiz Daint, the sixth ranked supercomputer in the world, according to the Top500 list. And the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)will make available three of its supercomputers, includingARCHER, a 2.55 petaflops system based at the University of Edinburgh. Other systems include the UKRIs Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) DIRAC supercomputing facility and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Councils (BBSRC) Earlham Institute, Norwich, UK.

COVID-19 is a global problem, so its important that we bring the tools to solve it to as many places across the globe as we can, Dave Turek,IBMVP of Technical Computing, told us. Thats why, even though the consortium originated in the U.S., were focused on adding members from other regions to enable supercomputing-fueled discovery where researchers need it.

Theconsortiums aggregate supercomputing power, now at 430 petaflops (IBMs Summit, at Oak Ridge National Lab and the worlds no. 1 supercomputer, is a 148.6 petaflops machine per the Linpack benchmark) supports research work in bioinformatics, epidemiology and molecular modeling of up to trillions of bits of pieces of data.

Projects include deep learning-based COVID-19 drug discovery.Innoplexus, Frankfurt, Germany, is using the consortiums compute power to train and improve the generative process, and the company reports it has identified five potentially promising molecules.

Researchers atUtah State University, in collaboration withLawrence Livermore National Laband the University of Illinois, are mapping how virus-laden droplet clouds are transported and and settle within hospitals and other indoor environments. The research involves complex multiphase turbulence simulations.

At theUniversity of Utah, researchers using the IBM Longhorn supercomputer are studying how the potential energy generated by atoms can give an overall molecule a positively or negatively charged force field that attracts or repels other molecules. Using AMBER molecular simulation software developed by one of the researchers, IBM said the scientists can measure experimental results to within one hundred-millionth of a centimeter, a measure that is imperceptible to all but the strongest microscopes, a capability used to combat the Ebola outbreak in 2014. The researchers have generated more than 2,000 molecular models of COVID-19-relevant compounds ranked based on the molecules force field energy estimates.

India-based Novel Techsciences is working to identify phytochemicals from among Indias 3,000 medicinal plants and anti-viral plant extracts that, its hoped, can act as natural drugs against the SARS-Cov 2 protein targets. Other work will be done to identify plant-derived compounds that could help tackle multi-drug resistance that may arise as the coronavirus evolves, according to IBM.

And atNASA, researchers are examining genetic traits for COVID-19 susceptibility, defining risk groups with genome analysis and supercomputer-enhanced DNA sequencing, IBM said. A goal of the work is to identify patients suited for clinical trials of vaccines and antivirals. The virus, the researchers state, seems to cause pneumonia, triggering an inflammatory response in the lungs called acute respiratory distress (ARDS), IBM reported. The researchers want to identify patients who are more prone to developing ARDS for clinical trials.

Beyond providing HPC access, the consortiums primary function is matchmaking between researchers with projects suitable for supercomputing. The platform providers themselves provide on-boarding and technical support.

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COVID-19 HPC Consortium Expands to Europe, Reports on Research Projects - HPCwire