Building a Global Defense System Against
Coronavirus (SARS-COV-2)

AI Draws World’s Smallest Wanted Posters to Apprehend COVID

Using AI and a supercomputer simulation, Ken Dill’s team drew the equivalent of wanted posters for a gang of proteins that make up COVID-19. With a little luck, one of their portraits could identify a way to arrest the coronavirus with a drug.

When the pandemic hit, “it was terrible for the world, and a big research challenge for us,” said Dill, who leads the Laufer Center for Physical & Quantitative Biology at Stony Brook University, in Long Island, New York.

Inception Spotlight: Synvivia Developing a Protein Switch for COVID-19

Synvivia uses GPU-accelerated molecular dynamics simulations to design protein molecule interactions and was able to observe potential additive effects of repurposed drug candidates on a particular SARS-CoV-2 protein target. After validating these computations using wet lab experiments, they were able to lay the groundwork for a new protein switch that could be key to the fight against COVID-19.

Drug Discovery in the Age of COVID-19

Drug discovery is like searching for the right jigsaw tile — in a puzzle box with 1060 molecular-size pieces. AI and HPC tools help researchers more quickly narrow down the options, like picking out a subset of correctly shaped and colored puzzle pieces to experiment with.

An effective small-molecule drug will bind to a target enzyme...

AI Helps Detect COVID-19 in Chest CT Images

NVIDIA Inception partner TrainingData.io recently developed a segmentation AI model that enables instant analysis of the progression of COVID-19 in chest CT images.

When the virus progresses through a patient’s body, there is a build-up of fluid in the tiny air sacs in the lungs called alveoli. The presence of this fluid causes inflammation of the lungs. The growth in inflammation of the lungs can be...

Startup’s AI Platform Allows Contact-Free Hospital Interactions

Hands-free phone calls and touchless soap dispensers have been the norm for years. Next up, contact-free hospitals.

San Francisco-based startup Ouva has created a hospital intelligence platform that monitors patient safety, acts as a patient assistant and provides a sensory experience in waiting areas — without the need for anyone to touch anything.

Meet the Researcher: Avantika Lal, Discovering Genes, Proteins, and Biological Processes Altered by COVID-19

Dr. Avantika Lal is a deep learning and genomics scientist at NVIDIA and was previously a researcher at Stanford University. She holds a PhD in genomics and is an expert in the genomics of infectious diseases and cancer. At NVIDIA, she develops artificial intelligence techniques to analyze genomic data, and applies these methods...

GPU-Accelerated Biomolecular Simulations and AI-Powered Chemistry

Molecular dynamics simulations and AI-powered computational chemistry are playing a key role in the fight against COVID-19, providing atomic-scale insights to viral mechanisms including virus-to-cell fusion, viral protein function, and ultimately possible therapeutics.

Using GPUs to Analyze COVID-19 Short Read Sequencing Data

Genomics analysis is playing a key role in COVID-19 studies, as the data from sequencing projects is helping researchers better understand and characterize the coronavirus.

With NVIDIA Parabricks, researchers can integrate GPU power into existing genomics workflows and rapidly sequence fragments to enhance research.

Atomwise Raises $123 Million to Accelerate AI Drug Discovery

Drug discovery startup Atomwise recently raised $123 million bringing the total amount of capital the company has raised to date to almost $175 million. Atomwise plans to use the new financing to continue to scale its AI technology platform, grow its internal pipeline of small molecule drug programs, and continue portfolio development of joint venture companies. The company will also expand its work with corporate partners, such as Eli Lilly and Company, Bayer, Hansoh Pharmaceuticals, and Bridge Biotherapeutics.

Racing the Clock, COVID Killer Sought Among a Billion Molecules

Working from home, sometimes in pajamas, Ada Sedova taps into the world’s most powerful supercomputer in the hunt for a tiny molecule that could stop the coronavirus from infecting someone with COVID-19.

“I’m getting more done than ever, and with all the anxiety around the pandemic, I’m devoting a lot of my personal time to this effort,” said Sedova, a biophysics researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Her efforts could bring a 10-figure payday — specifically 2 billion molecular tests executed in just 24 hours.

Screening for COVID-19: Japanese Startup Uses AI for Drug Discovery

Researchers are racing to discover the right drug molecule to treat COVID-19 — but the number of potential drug-like molecules out there is estimated to be an inconceivable 10⁶⁰.

“Even if you hypothetically checked one molecule per second, it would take longer than the age of the universe to explore the entire chemical space,” said Shinya Yuki, co-founder and CEO of Tokyo-based startup Elix, Inc. “AI can efficiently explore huge search spaces to solve difficult problems, whether in drug discovery, materials development or a game like Go.”

NVIDIA Chief Scientist Releases Low-Cost, Open-Source Ventilator Design

NVIDIA Chief Scientist Bill Dally this week released an open-source design for a low-cost, easy-to-assemble mechanical ventilator.

The ventilator, designed in just a few weeks by Dally — whose storied technology career includes key contributions to semiconductors and supercomputers — can be built quickly from just $400 of off-the-shelf parts, Dally says.

Traditional ventilators, by contrast, can cost more than $20,000 — and that’s when the world hasn’t been slammed with demand for the life-saving machines.

Learning Life’s ABCs: AI Models Read Proteins to Fight COVID-19

Ahmed Elnaggar and Michael Heinzinger are helping computers read proteins as easily as you read this sentence.

The researchers are applying the latest AI models used to understand text to the field of bioinformatics. Their work could accelerate efforts to characterize living organisms like the coronavirus.

By the end of the year, they aim to launch a website where researchers can plug in a string of amino acids that describe a protein. Within seconds, it will provide some details of the protein’s 3D structure, a key to knowing how to treat it with a drug.

ISC20 Featured Demo: Accelerating COVID-19 Research with NVIDIA GPUs

Scientists and researchers are racing against the clock to find a cure for COVID-19. The search requires the screening of billions of drug candidates and identifying the right chemical structure that will most favorably bind—and interfere—with the virus.

This demo shows that finding a drug for COVID-19 is challenging because the pool of potential drugs is enormous and calculations needed to identify the odds of a drug binding to the virus are compute intensive. However, GPUs accelerate this process, allowing researchers to screen over 1B candidates in 12 hours on the Oak Ridge National Lab’s Summit supercomputer.

GPU-Accelerated Molecular Dynamics Applications Help Fight COVID-19

As the world battles to reach a scientific breakthrough in the fight against COVID-19, scientists are turning to computing resources to accelerate their research. To help make the process for scientists more accessible, we’re spotlighting a few of the GPU-accelerated applications that developers can use right now in the fight against this virus.

Applications like AMBER, GROMACS, NAMD, and LAMMPS are some of the popular molecular dynamics simulation applications that leverage Newton’s laws to evaluate molecular motion at the atomic level.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Scientists Identify Compounds That Could Shed More Light on the Coronavirus

To help respond to the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are using the world’s fastest supercomputer to identify compounds that may effectively combat the virus.

Using Summit, which is powered by 9,216 IBM Power9 CPUs and over 27,000 NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs, the researchers identified 77 small-molecule drug compounds that are likely to bind to the glycosylated spike (S) protein, which is how the virus gains entry into host cells.

Qure.ai Helps Clinicians Answer Questions from COVID-19 Lung Scans

Qure.ai, a Mumbai-based startup, has been developing AI tools to detect signs of disease from lung scans since 2016. So when COVID-19 began spreading worldwide, the company raced to retool its solution to address clinicians’ urgent needs.

In use in more than two dozen countries, Qure.ai’s chest X-ray tool, qXR, was trained on 2.5 million scans to detect lung abnormalities — signs of tumors, tuberculosis and a host of other conditions.

Smart Hospitals: DARVIS Automates PPE Checks, Hospital Inventories Amid COVID Crisis

After an exhausting 12-hour shift caring for patients, it’s hard to blame frontline workers for forgetting to sing “Happy Birthday” twice to guarantee a full 30 seconds of proper hand-washing.

Though at times tedious, the process of confirming such detailed, protective measures like the amount of time hospital employees spend sanitizing their hands, the cleaning status of a room, or the number of beds available is crucial to preventing the spread of infectious diseases such as COVID-19.

Fighting COVID-19 in New Era of Scientific Computing

Scientists and researchers around the world are racing to find a cure for COVID-19.

That’s made the work of all those digitally gathered for this week’s high performance computing conference, ISC 2020 Digital, more vital than ever. And the work of these researchers is broadening to encompass a wider range of approaches than ever.

The NVIDIA scientific computing platform plays a vital role, accelerating progress across this entire spectrum of approaches — from data analytics to simulation and visualization to AI to edge processing.

Heart of the Matter: AI Helps Doctors Navigate Pandemic

A month after it got FDA approval, a startup’s first product was saving lives on the front lines of the battle against COVID-19.

Caption Health develops software for ultrasound systems, called Caption AI. It uses deep learning to empower medical professionals, including those without prior ultrasound experience, to perform echocardiograms quickly and accurately.

The results are images of the heart often worthy of an expert sonographer that help doctors diagnose and treat critically ill patients.

Quantum of Solace: Research Seeks Atomic Keys to Lock Down COVID-19

Anshuman Kumar is sharpening a digital pencil to penetrate the secrets of the coronavirus.

He and colleagues at the University of California at Riverside want to calculate atomic interactions at a scale never before attempted for the virus. If they succeed, they’ll get a glimpse into how a molecule on the virus binds to a molecule of a drug, preventing it from infecting healthy cells.

Kumar is part of a team at UCR taking work in the tiny world of quantum mechanics to a new level. They aim to measure a so-called barrier height, a measure of the energy required to interact with a viral protein that consists of about 5,000 atoms.

Folding@Home Crowdsources GPU-accelerated exaFLOP Supercomputer for COVID-19 Research

To help tackle COVID-19, the long-running Folding@Home program, a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, hit a breakthrough by achieving more than an exaflop of processing power. That’s more than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second, all through crowdsourcing efforts.

For comparison, Summit, the world’s fastest supercomputer, which is powered by more than 27,000 NVIDIA V100 GPUs, can officially sustain around 150 petaflops, and 445 when benchmarked on HPL-AI.

NVIDIA Gives COVID-19 Researchers Free Access to Clara Parabricks

When a crisis hits, we all pitch in with what we have. In response to the current pandemic, NVIDIA is sharing tools with researchers that can accelerate their race to understand the novel coronavirus and help inform a response.

Starting today, NVIDIA will provide a free 90-day license to NVIDIA Clara Parabricks to any researcher in the worldwide effort to fight the novel coronavirus. Based on the well-known Genome Analysis Toolkit, Clara Parabricks uses GPUs to accelerate by as much as 50x the analysis of sequence data.

Government of India, NVIDIA, and OpenACC Hackathon Helps Develop COVID-19 Solutions

The Government of India’s Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) under Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) in association with NVIDIA, and OpenACC, organized the SAMHAR-COVID19 Hackathon to help researchers combat ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and help the scientific community predict future outbreaks.

Through C-DAC’s program, Supercomputing using artificial intelligence, and Healthcare Analytics-based Research for combating COVID-19, researchers can get resources to find solutions for identifying, tracking and predicting outbreaks. The work has the potential to accelerate workflows for drug discovery and drug repurposing.

NVIDIA Releases New Clara Models to Help Fight COVID-19

NVIDIA today announced new AI models to help the medical community better track, test and treat COVID-19.

Available today, AI models developed jointly with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) can help researchers study the severity of COVID-19 from chest CT scans and develop new tools to better understand, measure and detect infections.

The models are immediately available in the latest release of Clara Imaging on the NGC software hub.

New NVIDIA Healthcare Webinar Series: COMPUTE4COVID

The novel coronavirus has changed the landscape of healthcare and the need for GPU-accelerated tools has been placed front and center.

HPC and AI tools are helping battle the novel coronavirus at every stage, from predicting and preventing outbreaks, detection and diagnosis, to drug and vaccine development, to treatment and patient care.

This series of technical talks will cover how NVIDIA tools can be used and how technology developed by leading startups is contributing to the worldwide effort against COVID-19.

New Breakthrough in Coronavirus Research Uses GPU-Accelerated Software to Support Treatment Development

To help in the development of a treatment or vaccine for COVID-19, University of Texas at Austin and National Institute of Health (NIH) researchers recently achieved a critical breakthrough—creating the first 3D, atomic-scale map of the virus.

“2019-nCoV makes use of a densely glycosylated spike (S) protein to gain entry into host cells,” the researchers stated in a newly published Science paper, Cryo-EM structure of the 2019-nCoV spike in the prefusion conformation. “The CoV spike (S) glycoprotein is a key target for vaccines, therapeutic antibodies, and diagnostics.”

COVID Caught on Camera: Startup’s Sensors Keep Hospitals Safe

Andrew Gostine’s startup aims to make hospitals more efficient, but when the coronavirus hit Chicago he pivoted to keeping them safer, too.

Gostine is a critical-care anesthesiologist at Northwestern Medicine’s 105-bed Lake Forest hospital, caring for 60 COVID-19 patients. He’s also the CEO of Whiteboard Coordinator Inc., a startup that had a network of 400 cameras and other sensors deployed across Northwestern’s 10 hospitals before the pandemic.

NVIDIA Brings GPU, HPC and AI Expertise to COVID-19 Battle

A task force of NVIDIA computer scientists has joined the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, which brings together leaders from the U.S. government, industry and academia to accelerate research using the world’s most powerful HPC resources.

The consortium’s objective is to accelerate development of effective methods to detect, contain and treat the coronavirus. It will support researchers by providing access to 30 supercomputers with over 400 petaflops of compute performance.

Virus War Goes Viral: Folding@home Gets 1.5+ Exaflops to Fight COVID-19

That’s when the research network that Folding@home manages had arguably become the world’s most powerful supercomputer. Its call to help fight the coronavirus on March 15 had amassed enough donations of spare cycles on home computers to create a crowd-sourced exascale supercomputer.

In just 10 days, supporters had downloaded the group’s software on hundreds of thousands of home PCs to help crack the code on COVID-19.

Startup Helps Deepen Our Understanding of COVID-19 with NVIDIA RTX-Powered AI

In the race to understand COVID-19, researchers need incredible computing power and performance to run and speed up their work.

New York-based startup Zeblok Computational is helping organizations accelerate their research with a cloud-native, AI platform-as-a-service that includes AI algorithms and high performance computing. It brings together all the elements data scientists need to develop AI and machine learning models, and allows them to more easily integrate AI solutions into their processes.

Zeblok is a member of NVIDIA Inception, a program designed to accelerate AI and data science startups with go-to-market support, expertise and technology assistance.

A Binding Decision: Startup Uses Microscopy Breakthrough to Speed Creation of COVID-19 Vaccines

In the global race to tame the spread of COVID-19, scientific researchers and pharmaceutical companies first must understand the virus’s protein structure.

Doing so requires building detailed 3D models of protein molecules, which until recently has been an intensely time-consuming task. Structura Biotechnology’s groundbreaking software is helping speed things along.

COVID-19 Spurs Scientific Revolution in Drug Discovery with AI

Research across global academic and commercial labs to create a more efficient drug discovery process won recognition today with a special Gordon Bell Prize for work fighting COVID-19.

A team of 27 researchers led by Rommie Amaro at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) combined high performance computing (HPC) and AI to provide the clearest view to date of the coronavirus, winning the award.

Creating Visualizations of Large Molecular Systems using NVIDIA Omniverse

Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could create beautiful and immersive scientific visualizations of large and dynamic simulations like Folding@Home’s simulation of COVID-19 spikes? In this post, we share our recipe to show that you can use NVIDIA Omniverse to create powerful cinematic visualizations from scientific data.

The beginning of any such project starts with trajectory data. To describe where to go from there, we use the approach to visualize Folding@Home’s exascale results from 1.2 ms of molecular dynamics simulations of SARS-CoV-2 spike assembly.

SC20 Demo: Exascale Simulation of COVID19 Using Folding@Home and NVIDIA Omniverse

NVIDIA is working closely with a wide range of organizations and researchers to help accelerate the creation of treatments and therapeutics for COVID-19. Identifying how and where the virus binds can help to disrupt this propagation chain. Numerical simulations can help researchers understand these processes, but the scale of the problem is enormous, keeping even the largest supercomputers busy.

Fighting COVID-19 in New Era of Scientific Computing

Scientists and researchers around the world are racing to find a cure for COVID-19.

That’s made the work of all those digitally gathered for this week’s high performance computing conference, ISC 2020 Digital, more vital than ever. And the work of these researchers is broadening to encompass a wider range of approaches than ever.

The NVIDIA scientific computing platform plays a vital role, accelerating progress across this entire spectrum of approaches — from data analytics to simulation and visualization to AI to edge processing.

New NVIDIA Healthcare Webinar Series: COMPUTE4COVID

The novel coronavirus has changed the landscape of healthcare and the need for GPU-accelerated tools has been placed front and center.

HPC and AI tools are helping battle the novel coronavirus at every stage, from predicting and preventing outbreaks, detection and diagnosis, to drug and vaccine development, to treatment and patient care.

This series of technical talks will cover how NVIDIA tools can be used and how technology developed by leading startups is contributing to the worldwide effort against COVID-19.

Smart Hospitals: DARVIS Automates PPE Checks, Hospital Inventories Amid COVID Crisis

After an exhausting 12-hour shift caring for patients, it’s hard to blame frontline workers for forgetting to sing “Happy Birthday” twice to guarantee a full 30 seconds of proper hand-washing.

Though at times tedious, the process of confirming such detailed, protective measures like the amount of time hospital employees spend sanitizing their hands, the cleaning status of a room, or the number of beds available is crucial to preventing the spread of infectious diseases such as COVID-19.

COVID Caught on Camera: Startup’s Sensors Keep Hospitals Safe

Andrew Gostine’s startup aims to make hospitals more efficient, but when the coronavirus hit Chicago he pivoted to keeping them safer, too.

Gostine is a critical-care anesthesiologist at Northwestern Medicine’s 105-bed Lake Forest hospital, caring for 60 COVID-19 patients. He’s also the CEO of Whiteboard Coordinator Inc., a startup that had a network of 400 cameras and other sensors deployed across Northwestern’s 10 hospitals before the pandemic.

Inception Spotlight: Synvivia Developing a Protein Switch for COVID-19

Synvivia uses GPU-accelerated molecular dynamics simulations to design protein molecule interactions and was able to observe potential additive effects of repurposed drug candidates on a particular SARS-CoV-2 protein target. After validating these computations using wet lab experiments, they were able to lay the groundwork for a new protein switch that could be key to the fight against COVID-19.

Coronavirus Gets a Close-Up: Folding@home Live in NVIDIA Omniverse

For researchers like Max Zimmerman, it was a welcome pile-on to tackle a global pandemic.

A million citizen scientists donated time on their home systems so the Folding@home consortium could calculate the intricate movements of proteins inside the coronavirus. Then a team of NVIDIA simulation experts combined the best tools from multiple industries to let the researchers see their data in a whole new way.

Virus War Goes Viral: Folding@home Gets 1.5+ Exaflops to Fight COVID-19

That’s when the research network that Folding@home manages had arguably become the world’s most powerful supercomputer. Its call to help fight the coronavirus on March 15 had amassed enough donations of spare cycles on home computers to create a crowd-sourced exascale supercomputer.

In just 10 days, supporters had downloaded the group’s software on hundreds of thousands of home PCs to help crack the code on COVID-19.

NVIDIA Brings GPU, HPC and AI Expertise to COVID-19 Battle

A task force of NVIDIA computer scientists has joined the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, which brings together leaders from the U.S. government, industry and academia to accelerate research using the world’s most powerful HPC resources.

The consortium’s objective is to accelerate development of effective methods to detect, contain and treat the coronavirus. It will support researchers by providing access to 30 supercomputers with over 400 petaflops of compute performance.

Fighting COVID-19 in New Era of Scientific Computing

Scientists and researchers around the world are racing to find a cure for COVID-19.

That’s made the work of all those digitally gathered for this week’s high performance computing conference, ISC 2020 Digital, more vital than ever. And the work of these researchers is broadening to encompass a wider range of approaches than ever.

The NVIDIA scientific computing platform plays a vital role, accelerating progress across this entire spectrum of approaches — from data analytics to simulation and visualization to AI to edge processing.

Government of India, NVIDIA, and OpenACC Hackathon Helps Develop COVID-19 Solutions

The Government of India’s Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) under Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) in association with NVIDIA, and OpenACC, organized the SAMHAR-COVID19 Hackathon to help researchers combat ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and help the scientific community predict future outbreaks.

Through C-DAC’s program, Supercomputing using artificial intelligence, and Healthcare Analytics-based Research for combating COVID-19, researchers can get resources to find solutions for identifying, tracking and predicting outbreaks. The work has the potential to accelerate workflows for drug discovery and drug repurposing.

New NVIDIA Healthcare Webinar Series: COMPUTE4COVID

The novel coronavirus has changed the landscape of healthcare and the need for GPU-accelerated tools has been placed front and center.

HPC and AI tools are helping battle the novel coronavirus at every stage, from predicting and preventing outbreaks, detection and diagnosis, to drug and vaccine development, to treatment and patient care.

This series of technical talks will cover how NVIDIA tools can be used and how technology developed by leading startups is contributing to the worldwide effort against COVID-19.

New Breakthrough in Coronavirus Research Uses GPU-Accelerated Software to Support Treatment Development

To help in the development of a treatment or vaccine for COVID-19, University of Texas at Austin and National Institute of Health (NIH) researchers recently achieved a critical breakthrough—creating the first 3D, atomic-scale map of the virus.

“2019-nCoV makes use of a densely glycosylated spike (S) protein to gain entry into host cells,” the researchers stated in a newly published Science paper, Cryo-EM structure of the 2019-nCoV spike in the prefusion conformation. “The CoV spike (S) glycoprotein is a key target for vaccines, therapeutic antibodies, and diagnostics.”