With the coronavirus sweeping the globe, tech conferences and supply chains are being hit hard – but now, tech is hitting back. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has announced that Summit, the most powerful publicly ranked supercomputer in the world, is joining the fight to understand and mitigate the coronavirus.
The Summit supercomputer.
Summit, which tops the most recent Top500 list, is an IBM-built system packed with 4,608 nodes (each powered by two IBM Power9 CPUs and six Nvidia Volta GPUs), delivering 148 Linpack petaflops. Now, that firepower is being turned toward the coronavirus, with Summit taking aim at a telltale “spike” protein on the virus that may be the key to developing drugs to fight it.
