Forward Slash: Land of the tech giants as mega computer joins war on COVID

A new super-fast supercomputer is promising to greatly accelerate efforts to find a cure for COVID-19.

Immunologist Katherine Kedzierska at the Doherty Institute in Melbourne. Picture: David Caird

A new supercomputer is promising to greatly accelerate efforts to find a cure for COVID-19, after some of the world’s biggest technology ­companies agreed to team up in a rare show of ­collaboration.

IBM, along with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Intel and others, have shared their computing resources with governments and ­academia to form the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, which offers 483 ­petaflops of computing power.

It’s essentially the most souped-up calculator ever built, and it is detailed in the first episode of Forward Slash, a new podcast by The Australian, out now.

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“There are eight billion people on Earth at the moment, and if each one did a million calculations every second that would be eight petaflops of computing power. The HPC Consortium is offering about 50 times that capability,” Oxford professor and IBM ­research lead Jason Crain told The Australian.

“So this is really eye-watering, staggering amounts of computational power being directed to the coronavirus challenge.”

IBM’s contribution is called Summit, the most powerful computer on the planet. Professor Crain said the supercomputer was used to model COVID-19 in great detail and then rapidly test a range of potential treatments to sift through the vast array of options and identify promising candidates.

“We use it to suggest new or unrecognised molecules that could act as possible viral inhibitors,” he said. “And we’re using computational simulation of the viral proteins to watch how molecules work, how they interact in realistic environments, and simulate their behaviour … so you could then design things that interfere with their processes and their mechanisms.

“And with that kind of power and speed, the aim is that we can accelerate discovery by maybe 100 times (faster) than if you had to synthesise and do these experiments in the lab all the time.”

The Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Melbourne has been at the forefront of global coronavirus research, and was the first lab to grow the COVID-19 virus outside of China. At the institute, researchers including Katherine Kedzierska and Dale Godfrey have been busy mapping immune responses from COVID-19 patients, aiming to use them to help find a cure.

Professor Kedzierska made a landmark discovery in March that our immune system responds to coronavirus in the same way it does when trying to fight the flu.

Professor Godfrey is part of a group, dubbed the Global Virus Network, which has a Zoom chat room in which scientists around the world share their successes every couple of weeks.

“It’s very open and relaxed; it’s not very formal,” Professor Godfrey said. “It’s quite good fun, ­actually, to exchange ideas and discoveries about what’s going on and what’s working. And it has certainly found an important role in supporting COVID research, and I think the international community spirit that’s coming out won’t go away.”

He added that something as ­serious as fighting a global pandemic meant it was important to retain a sense of fun.

“When we get a good result, we celebrate, we high five,” he said. “It keeps us sane. A lot of us are not in the lab a lot of the time because of social distancing, and I’m conducting things from a remote site on a Zoom meeting.

“You need a bit of comic relief and a bit of fun with the people working with you on this.”