At the starting line the most impressive experiment ever carried out before simulating the behavior of the SarsCoV2 virus: the Italian simulation, based on the supercomputer of the Cineca inter-university Consortium, is announced to be 300 times larger and 500 times faster than that carried out in the United States last June.
The goal is to identify the most efficient therapies to neutralize it, notes the director general of Cineca, David Vannozzi.
"To get an idea of the magnitude - he observes - it is necessary to think that over 70 billion molecules will be tested on 15" active sites "of the virus through the processing of 1,000 billion interactions in just 60 hours, going from a capacity of 3 million of simulated molecules per second to 5 million simulated molecules per second ".
"The pandemic has thus imposed a new dimension on scientific and clinical research. Think of the time needed to develop the vaccine: for the flu vaccine it took 28 years, 15 years for the vaccine against papilloma virus, only 9 months for the anti-Covid vaccine.
The power of supercomputers - continues Vannozzi - has revolutionized the world of research. The vaccine will give us immunity from Covid, but therapeutic treatments for the sick are no less necessary and urgent. the most appropriate molecules is decisive for saving lives ".
The simulation of the behavior of the new coronavirus was made possible, with the coordination of the Dompé company, thanks to the molecular library Exscalate and to the HPC5 supercomputers of Eni and Marconi100 of Cineca (81 petaflops of computing capacity) the virtual screening software created and optimized by the Politecnico di Milano, Cineca, and the analytics of Sas.
