Summit, the world's most powerful supercomputer used to find a way to treat Covid-19

On February 16, the US Department of Energy announced that it will use IBM's Summit supercomputer to speed up the search for Covid-19 treatments.

Scientists hope the Summit supercomputer will help improve the speed of digital simulations to narrow the range of potential variables. Typically, the virus research process takes a lot of time and appears many variables.

IBM said that using computers to perform simulations will help test many reaction variables for each different virus at the same time. Each of these individual variables includes huge amounts of data, possibly up to millions or even billions of different data.

Without using superior processing power from supercomputers, this process will take place in a very long time.

With supercomputers like Summit, the simulation results will be available in one to two days. Shorten a lot of time compared to several months if using a normal computer.

Summit is the fastest supercomputer in the world today, with the ability to perform 200 million billion calculations / second, about the size of 2 tennis courts. It is the result of a collaboration between IBM and Nvidia - the maker of graphics chips and is located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA.