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Researchers bring innovative AI and simulation tools to the COVID-19 battlefront

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In its on-going campaign to reveal the inner workings of the Sar-CoV-2 virus, the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory is leading efforts to couple artificial intelligence (AI) and cutting-edge simulation workflows to better understand biological observations and accelerate drug discovery. Argonne collaborated with academic and commercial research partners to achieve near real-time feedback between simulation and AI approaches to understand how two proteins in the SARS-CoV-2 viral genome, nsp10 and nsp16, interact to help the virus replicate and elude the host's immune system. The team achieved this milestone by coupling two distinct hardware platforms: Cerebras CS-1, a processor-packed silicon wafer deep learning accelerator; and ThetaGPU, an AI- and simulation-enabled extension of the Theta supercomputer, housed at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science User Facility. To enable this capability, the team developed Stream-AI-MD, a novel application of the AI method called deep learning to drive adaptive molecular dynamics (MD) simulations in a streaming manner. Data from simulations is streamed from ThetaGPU onto the Cerebras CS-1 platform to simultaneously analyze how the two proteins interact.