Since coronavirus spread throughout the world, people have been comparing it to a number of influenza adjacent pandemics in the past, including the Spanish Flu. 

As we pointed out recently, though, a lot has changed since the early 1900s. We have made significant advancements in modern medicine, and technology, and combined, those two things could be exactly what we need to beat COVID-19.

That’s where ‘Summit’ comes in.

Summit is the world’s most powerful supercomputer. Its developers at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory claim that it can perform 200 quadrillion calculations per second, which is more than the entire human population could do in a year.

Summit’s main job is research into artificial intelligence, astronomy and health care, so naturally, it was employed to try and find a way to help with the fight against coronavirus as soon as the infection took hold, globally.

Here’s CNN,

[The] supercomputer equipped with the “brain of AI,” ran thousands of simulations to analyze which drug compounds might effectively stop the virus from infecting host cells.

Summit was commissioned in 2014 for the sole purpose of solving the world’s problems. It has the power of 200 petaflops which means that it is 1 million times faster than a laptop.

Oak Ridge researcher Micholas Smith created a model of the coronavirus spike based on research published in January. With Summit, he simulated how the atoms and particles in the viral protein would react to different compounds.

The supercomputer ran simulations of over 8,000 compounds that could bind to the spike protein of the virus, which could limit its ability to spread to host cells. Summit identified 77 of them and ranked them based on how likely they were to bind to the spike.

The team will continue to run simulations with a more accurate model of the coronavirus. Once Summit has done its thing, the data that it generates will be used to conduct tests to find out which compounds work best.

The studies that will result from this information could go a long way towards finding an effective COVID-19 treatment.

This video explains everything:

Keep the faith!

Stay safe out there.

[source:cnn]