A consortium of U.S. government agencies and private industry is using the U.S. space agency NASAs supercomputer to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic, examining everythingfromhow the virus interacts with cells in the human body,to genetic risk factors,to screening for potential therapeutic drugs.

The consortiumwas organized by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and includes industry partners IBM, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Amazon, Microsoft and others, as well as the Department of Energys National Laboratories, the National Science Foundation, and several universities.

The consortium is a pairing up supercomputing resources with proposals for using high-end computing power for COVID-19 studies. The agencys supercomputer is housed at NASAs Ames Research Center in northern California, and, while it is usually used for Earth and space-related projects, it has time reserved for national priorities.

Supercomputers are suited for processing large amounts of data and are invaluable for NASAs usual projects, such as running simulations used to hunting for planets outside our solar system, studying the behavior of black holes, or designing aeronautic or aerospace vehicles.

Likewise, it is well-suited forrunning simulations to help researchers understand COVID-19. The computer-run simulations help researchers understand how the coronavirus reacts on the cellular and molecular level.

The NASA computer so far is being used to study geneticriskfactorsin the virus that may lead toRespiratory DistressSyndrome, (ARDS); develop 3D molecular geometry to search forpossibledrugtherapies against the virus, research the coronavirusproteinshelland how itmay besusceptible to drugs or vaccines, and toidentify COVID-19-relatedbiomarkersand how they react with the human body tocausereactions.

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NASA Supercomputer Used to Fight COVID-19 - Voice of America