Washington, DC – The United States has a supercomputer nearly one million times faster than your average computer. This supercomputer is a major asset and critical part of the nation’s response to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19).

Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans have advocated for the latest COVID-19 stimulus package – the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act – to have $100 million for the Department of Energy to use for allowing access to its facilities and resources for research and analysis.

Read more from the Department of Energy about the efforts of the Trump administration, private industry, and academic leaders to harmonize their efforts and advance our nation’s supercomputing resources to rapidly learn more about the virus.

Stories from The Hill and CNBC follow below.

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The Hill

The world’s fastest supercomputer is taking on coronavirus

By Joseph Guzman

https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-cures/488627-the-worlds-fastest-supercomputer-is-taking-on

The world’s fastest and smartest supercomputer has identified dozens of small-molecule drug compounds that could potentially be used to stop the coronavirus from infecting host cells, a crucial step for developing a much-needed drug treatment to combat the novel coronavirus.

Researchers at the U.S. The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory used IBM’s supercomputer “Summit,” to screen more than 8,000 compounds to identify those most likely to bind to the main “spike” protein of the coronavirus, rendering it unable to infect host cells.

The supercomputer identified 77 compounds and ranked them based on how likely they were to bind to the spike. Viruses infect host cells by injecting them with the spike of genetic material.

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“Summit was needed to rapidly get the simulation results we needed. It took us a day or two whereas it would have taken months on a normal computer,” Jeremy Smith, director of the University of Tennessee/Oak Ridge National Laboratory Center for Molecular Biophysics, said in a statement.

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The supercomputer was commissioned by the Department of Energy (DOE) in 2014. It has the computing speed of 200 quadrillion calculations per second. That is roughly a million times greater than the average laptop.

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Read the full story here.

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CNBC

IBM and White House to deploy supercomputer power to fight coronavirus outbreak

By Hannah Miller

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/22/ibm-and-white-house-to-deploy-supercomputers-to-fight-coronavirus.html?__source=sharebar|twitter&par=sharebar

IBM is partnering with the White House to make a vast amount of supercomputing power available to help researchers stop the spreading coronavirus pandemic, according to the Trump administration.

The tech company has teamed up with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the U.S. Department of Energy to launch the the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, according to a statement from Dario Gil, director of IBM Research.

The supercomputing power will be available to help researchers develop predictive models to analyze how the disease is progressing as well as model new potential therapies or a possible vaccine.

“These high-performance computing systems allow researchers to run very large numbers of calculations in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling,” Gil said. “These experiments would take years to complete if worked by hand, or months if handled on slower, traditional computing platforms.”

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Other partners in the new consortium include NASA, MIT, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories, and the National Science Foundation.

Read the full story here.

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