Simulation / Modeling / Design

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.

To perform the numerical simulations needed to understand these processes, researchers turned to Folding@home, which aggregates spare computing cycles of volunteer’s home computers — including 200,000 NVIDIA GPUs — to create a supercomputer of more than 1 exaflop!

NVIDIA Omniverse — an open platform built for virtual collaboration and real-time photorealistic simulation — took the analysis of visualization even further, enabling greater insights.

In this demo, we’ll show how NVIDIA Omniverse was used to visualize the extraordinary folding motion of COVID-19 spike proteins to better understand how the virus attaches to human cells.

The simulation shows the dynamic behavior of COVID’s spike, which exhibits binding sites that can latch onto human cells. Using NVIDIA Omniverse to visualize this simulation output gives us an idea of the dangerous dance performed by the virus’ spikes, but also could help identify regions where potential treatments could attack.

NVIDIA’s COVID-19 efforts> 

Read the Developer Blog: Creating Visualizations of Large Molecular Systems using NVIDIA Omniverse

Folding@Home Container on NGC>

NVIDIA Omniverse>

View all SC20 Demos> 

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