Apr 16, 2020
On this special episode of The Six Five - Insiders Edition hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman welcome Dave Turek, Vice President, HPC and OpenPOWER for IBM Cognitive Systems to discuss IBM’s response to COVID-19 and how this will impact our future.
Tech for Good
IBM has always been a company built around solving problems. The corporate philosophy has always included the pursuit of tech for good. It’s fair to say that we are facing an unprecedented situation in our lifetime. IBM is working to coalesce not only product assets but services assets too that can help with the fight against COVID-19.
Many people might not know that IBM has a team of basic researchers in a wide variety of science fields. From chemistry and physics to electronics and astronomy, IBM researchers in facilities all over the world are working to target this problem.
Last month, the president announced the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium which was an effort sponsored by IBM, The White House and the Department of Energy. This consortium will bring supercomputing assets from around the world together for researchers to work on solutions for COVID-19. Not all assets are from IBM, but we are one team working to find a common goal.
History of Supercomputing at IBM
IBM has been working on supercomputing since the 1980s. They pioneered the machines that have been used to solve the complex problems of the day. But, as Dave noted, IBM has pioneered supercomputing in a way that has completely flipped the notion of thinking. In the late 90s IBM introduced Blue Gene that brought in a new era of high performance computing. It focused on energy efficiency. Blue Gene used tons of low-power processors to gang tackle the problems at hand. It only used a fraction of the energy and floor space that other supercomputers used.
Roadrunner, which came a few years later, was the first petascale computer. It was built from microprocessors from AMD and IBM and then cell processors that were originally developed for game consoles. Now, it’s quite common to see GPUs in supercomputers.
In 2011, IBM then looked at the system and realized it should revolve around data. Big data was starting to become popular in business. So Summit at Oak Ridge brought together the concepts of high-performance computing, machine learning, and deep learning on one platform.
Summit and COVID-19: Supercomputing to Fight the Virus
Summit was launched in 2018 at Oak Ridge where researchers set out to determine how they could take classical HPC methods and apply artificial intelligence to solve problems. Some of the early problems that researchers used Summit to solve were in the fields of biology and microbiology so as COVID-19 manifested itself, it made sense to the researchers at Oak Ridge to look into the ways HPC and artificial intelligence could be used to understand the virus and find a cure.
Specifically, researchers are using Summit to identify the ways molecules and atoms interact in the virus. They can simulate the ways different compounds interact leveraging supercomputing capabilities that drastically reduced the amount of time needed to understand the virus.
Researchers at Oak Ridge and the University of Tennessee have used the Summit Machine and molecular dynamics to look at what compounds can inhibit the virus from replicating itself. They started with 8000 compounds and narrowed it down to 77. That’s a 99% reduction in compounds that have been computationally eliminated. These researchers are now able to refine and run more computational experiments that will ultimately help in laboratory experiments that will determine a cure or treatment plans for COVID-19.
Looking Toward the Future
The future of supercomputing won’t necessarily be around building something faster and better, but taking the existing technologies that we have and reconsidering them to solve new problems. There will likely be a huge amount of innovation in the area of the incorporation of novel ways of thinking and characterizing problems that are going to be shown as having value independent of the underlying hardware, but the magnitude of what is returned to the user will be so great.
If you’d like to learn more about IBM and their response to the COVID-19 pandemic be sure to check out their website and explore the projects and resources they have. Also listen to the full episode below and while you’re at it, be sure to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode of The Six Five podcast.