Using the world’s most powerful supercomputers to tackle COVID-19

The world's most powerful supercomputers are being used by UCL researchers for urgent investigations into the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the associated COVID-19 disease with the aim of accelerating the development of treatments, including antiviral drugs and vaccines. Professor Peter Coveney, who leads the EU H2020 Computational Biomedicine Centre of Excellence, and his colleagues at the UCL Centre for Computational Science, are part of a consortium of more than a hundred researchers from across the US and Europe, who are using an exceptional array of supercomputers - including the biggest one in Europe and the most powerful on the planet - to study several aspects of the virus and disease in detail. The concerted research effort focuses on five areas: identifying new antiviral drugs by screening libraries of potential drugs, including those that have already been licensed to treat other diseases accelerating vaccine development by identifying virus proteins or parts of protein that stimulate immunity studying the spread of the virus within communities analysing the origin and structure of the SARS-CoV-2 genome studying how the SARS-CoV-2 virus interacts with human cells to turn them into virus factories The UCL team has access to supercomputers at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, Brookhaven, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, Oak Ridge, the San Diego Supercomputing Center, the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) at Leibniz Rechenzentrum (LRZ) and the Hartree Centre.