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been made. Billion-compound docking is a tailor-made task for massively parallel supercomputing.
Dawn of the exascale era
Work will be helped by the arrival of the next big machine at Oak Ridge, planned for next year. Called Frontier, the new machine should be about 10 times more powerful than Summit, and it will herald the exascale supercomputing era, meaning machines capable of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (or 1 quintillion) calculations per second.
Although some fear supercomputers will take over the world, for the time being at least, they are humanity’s servants, which means they do what we tell them to. Different scientists
have different ideas about how to calculate which drugs work best so there’s quite a lot of arguing going on.
Hopefully, scientists armed with the most powerful computers in the world will, sooner rather than later, find the drugs needed to tackle COVID-19. If they do, then their answers will be of more immediate benefit, if less philosophically tantalizing, than the answer to the ultimate question provided by Deep Thought, which was, maddeningly, simply 42. n
Jeremy Smith holds the governor’s chair for molecular biophysics at the University of Tennessee. This article was first published on The Conversation.
NIH creates central database for COVID-19 research
The National Institutes of Health launched a secure research enclave where scientists can share and mine medical data from people diagnosed with coronavirus.
The central data platform will help researchers analyze a huge mass of data in an effort to better understand the disease and potentially identify more effective treatments, NIH officials said in a June 15 statement. The platform is part of its National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C).
Funded by NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), N3C will create a platform capable of systematically collecting clinical, laboratory and diagnostic
data from health providers across the country. It will harmonize and standardize the data so it can
be quickly sorted and searched
by researchers and health care providers to accelerate COVID-19 research and improve patient care.
Officials said a centralized data platform could unlock answers to questions that were previously unknowable because patient data was disparate and scattered. It could provide keener insight into which patients are prone to kidney failure and may require dialysis, help predict which patients might need ventilators before the need arises or detect different patient responses to
the virus that could require different treatments.
“NCATS initially supported the development of this innovative, collaborative technology platform to speed the process of understanding the course of diseases and identifying interventions to effectively treat them,” NCATS Director Dr. Christopher Austin
said in the NIH statement. “This platform was deployed to stand up this important COVID-19 effort in a matter of weeks, and we anticipate that it will serve as the foundation for addressing future public health emergencies.”
National COVID Cohort Collaborative
Data partnership Phenotype and Data ingest and Collaborative and governance data acquisition harmonization analytics
Revealed associations and insights
Rapid results and credit
— Mark Rockwell
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