Eni Pitches Supercomputer Against Virus

Eni Pitches Supercomputer Against Virus
Eni (NYSE: E) has announced that its HPC5 supercomputer has run the most complex molecular computation test ever conducted in the world in order to identify new treatments against the virus.

Eni (NYSE: E) has announced that its HPC5 supercomputer has run the most complex molecular computation test ever conducted in the world in order to identify new treatments against the virus.

The computation, which took place in Eni’s Green Data Center in Ferrera Erbognone, is a simulation that tested over 70 billion molecules on 15 virus ‘active sites’. It processed a thousand billion interactions in less than 60 hours, which translates to over five million simulations per second.

The HPC5 is one of the resources supplied for free by Eni as part of a broad action plan developed by the company to combat the pandemic. The supercomputer was made available in the second phase of the EU-funded project EXSCALATE4CoV, which is a consortium that works to identify the safest and most promising new drugs in the fight against coronavirus.

At a later trial stage, research will focus on molecule activity in case of virus mutations. The project, which is led by the biopharmaceutical company Dompè, has brought together 18 partners among institutions and research centers from seven European countries.

Eni describes the HPC5 as the most powerful supercomputer for industrial use in the world. The HPC5 is a set of parallel computing units with a peak processing power of 51.7 petaFlops. Combined with the supercomputing system in operation since 2018 (HPC4), the peak computational capacity of the infrastructure totals 70 petaFlops, or 70 million billion mathematical operations performed in a single second. Eni used the supercomputer to find Zohr, the largest gas field ever discovered in the Mediterranean.

As of November 26, there have been 59.8 million confirmed cases of coronavirus globally, with 1.41 million deaths, according to the latest figures from the World Health Organization (WHO). The worst affected region, in terms of cases and deaths as of November 26, is the Americas, WHO data shows.

To contact the author, email andreas.exarheas@rigzone.com



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