The battle against the coronavirus may lie in the hands of a supercomputer housed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
AiMOS, RPI's supercomputer, is being made available to researchers and the government to find a way to beat the coronavirus.
"So one way to think of it, is it's 8 quadrillion calculations per second," said RPI Chief Information Officer John Kolb.
AiMOS, or the Artificial Intelligence Multiprocessing Optimized System, launched in the fall. It's the third generation of supercomputers like it housed at RPI. Because the machine is so powerful, Kolb says it can help calculate data that's significant for multiple facets of fighting the virus.
"How is something like the coronavirus spread, where are the places they've done more effective testing, where are the places where there's an older age demographic and all sorts of things that would go into this calculation," Kolb said. "And you can capture it at a very large scale, which is very important if you want to go after this thing scientifically."
While a lot of that comes from the AI side, AiMOS also has even more sophisticated uses — everything from being able to research current medications that could treat COVID-19 — to the specifics of how it affects different patients and why.
RPI President Dr. Shirley Jackson says the school, in its partnership with IBM, is part of a consortium to make this technology available to researchers and the government to help fight the coronavirus.
"It is very important and gratifying to be able to be part of an effort here to do what we can do to help address this huge public health, I call it, 'existential' threat," Jackson said.
And it's not the first time RPI has been part of helping with a pandemic like this. The school's previous generation of supercomputer was used for researching H1N1 about a decade ago, as well helping researchers at RPI develop the first bioengineered heparin, which is going through trial phases now.
"These are things that people have developed expertise about, but along the way, have developed knowledge about what can be interventional therapies," Jackson said. "And so they're working on these things as well."
The edge over its previous model? AiMOS has just a little more gusto.
"The machine we had 10 years ago, was about one-one hundredth of what this machine is, and that was one of the fastest systems in the world," Kolb said. "This system is actually the most powerful system in a private university in the country, and so we're very fortunate that it's here so we can apply to a problem that's close to home."
Dr. Jackson says they're ready to take requests for proposals from researchers or other entities to help with COVID-19 research as part of that consortium.