ISC 2020: Accelerating COVID-19 Research with GPUs

The stakes are high as scientists and researchers are racing against the clock to find a cure for COVID-19. The search for an antiviral depends on finding the right chemical structure that binds to the virus and interferences with its viral replication. Finding the right drug requires screening billions of drug candidates and identifying which drugs will most favorably bind with the virus. However, calculating the binding potential is computationally intensive and will take years to screen a billion compounds on a CPU system. The GPU accelerates this process by 33x and GPU-powered Summit system can now scan over 1B compounds in 12 hours.