Europe UK (Commonwealth Union) – The advancement of digital technology is no recent phenomena, as it goes back decades, however the recent rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has further accelerated this advance.
A University College London, (UCL) led research team is utilizing the world’s 1st exascale computer to identify a contender of possible new drugs for diseases to gain an enhanced knowledge on ways a stroke impacts the brain.
Exascale is next level supercomputing which will carry out tasks at much faster speed than existing computer technology and capable of analyzing scientific data at much faster levels which is likely to pave the way for new discoveries at a rapid rate.
The supercomputer, Frontier, at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee, US, is a world 1st with the ability of an exaflop, which is a billion operations a second. A team led by Professor Peter Coveney of the UCL Chemistry and the Advanced Research Computing Centre, is among research groups winning access to the new computer, commencing from the moment it started production on 1 January.
The team is set to apply Frontier for 2 projects, where one is targeted at speeding up drug discovery by applying an AI algorithm screening millions of chemical compounds and noting the drug candidates having the best potential, capable of being tested in a lab and potentially speeding up a clinical trial.
“Frontier is a major step ahead of any other supercomputer in the world. It’s at the absolute peak of what is possible, opening up new areas of science that were previously inaccessible. By identifying a shortlist of potential drugs quickly, we hope to speed up the slow and expensive process of drug discovery, doing the early phase computationally rather than in a lab. This should enable companies to rapidly move on to compounds that are likely to be successful, improving a process that typically takes 10 years and costs billions – and often ends in failure,” explained Professor Coveney.
