How supercomputers are being used in the fight against COVID-19

Scientists have launched a worldwide effort to help find a treatment or vaccine for COVID-19 and they need our help.

Supercomputers and artificial intelligence (AI) can help change the world. They can be put to work helping to combat climate change, or help find a cure for illness. Their raw power and potential have been the stuff of science fiction for more than a century.

In the past three months, Swinburne University astrophysicist Matthew Bailes and his experienced team of data analysts have redirected their considerable skills towards the urgent task of understanding COVID-19. Professor Bailes is in the process of gathering data from across the world on COVID-19’s symptoms. His #beatcovid19now team is seeking ways to better understand the virus and the conditions under which it thrives.

“We’re exploring whether we can help understand what symptoms people show in the lead-up to developing COVID-19, and whether or not it is possible to predict new outbreaks,” Bailes said.

CRUNCHING THE NUMBERS

As medical researchers and governments around the world are quickly amassing data about the pandemic, they’re also tasked with searching through vast troves of previous research that could prove relevant to COVID-19. With any large volume of various data sources, it’s incredibly difficult to sort through and pull meaningful scientific insights.

Tech powerhouse IBM has joined in with some of the most sophisticated supercomputers ever built to do just this; more than 25 of their supercomputers are now being used for free to help scientists searching for a vaccine or treatment against the virus.

These mighty systems allow researchers to run very large numbers of calculations in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling, and access structured and unstructured data quickly.

Since IBM launched the project in mid-March, the COVID-19 High Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium has provided over 58 separate scientific research efforts access to these powerful supercomputing resources. In a rare show of unity, the project has seen rival companies, like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Hewlett Packard, working together for a common good alongside NASA and many of the world’s leading research universities.

At Swinburne, Professor Bailes’ team is assembling their raw data through an internationally distributed, voluntary and anonymous symptom questionnaire. “When we get into trying to model the data and simulation work, it will be handy to have that kind of supercomputer grunt behind us,” he says.

The models that emerge can then be used to train artificial intelligence to recognise warning signs as they slowly appear in the real world.

Flinders University virologist Nikolai Petrovsky is crunching the numbers that reveal the virus’ physical characteristics. This can lead to the discovery of any ‘Achilles heels’ that can be targeted by drugs, which could then lead to vaccines.

Researchers all over the world are working together to try and find treatments and a vaccine for COVID-19. Supercomputers are being used to speed up this effort. Picture: Virginia Mayo/AP

“What we do is simulate the behaviour of this virus and its effects on different proteins in the body, Petrovsky says, “This is what we call modelling. Modelling typically needs massive computational power.”

YOUR COMPUTER CAN HELP JOIN THE FIGHT

Researchers worldwide have now had open access to IBM’s HPC Consortium for over two months, and in May the company also launched Open Pandemics, a new stream of their crowdsourced computing network World Community Grid, to help us non-scientists contribute to the search for a vaccine.

Basically, anyone in the world with a PC, Mac or Android phone and an internet connection can donate their device’s unused processing power to create a ‘virtual supercomputer’ for scientists. With this, scientists perform virtual experiments to identify which chemical compounds could be used in treatments for COVID-19.

These tools are an excellent way to simulate what could happen in a lab experiment, to see how well a compound might perform against the disease, but with millions of compounds to test they need enough computing power to complete the simulations at scale - which would take years that we don’t have.

Your idle computer can be used to help perform these calculations and to volunteer all you need to do is create an account and download the World Community Grid software. The app can even help do the calculations while you’re using it for something else and it always gives priority to what you need to do, automatically pausing until there’s free capacity again.

With your computer down time, researchers can use this virtual supercomputer to not only look at Sars-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, but at related coronaviruses, and get a jump-start on finding drugs that could be effective against future similar diseases.

Forward Slash is a podcast series about how massive changes in the world are colliding with advances in technology. The first episode is dedicated to the hunt for a vaccine.

This article was created in partnership with IBM