West Chester Computers Churn Out Quantum Chemistry Computations To Help Fight COVID-19

Press release from West Chester University:

May 19, 2020

A Cadre of Computers Churns Out Quantum Chemistry Computations to Help Fight COVID-19

WCU’s Information Services and Technologies (IS&T) has integrated 52 computers located
in Schmucker Science Center South into a grid computing consortium known as the World
Community Grid. The Scripps Research Institute will harness this consortium’s immense
computational resources to look for possible treatments for COVID-19 (https://www.ibm.org/OpenPandemics). Since IS&T joined Team WCU, our contribution has consistently ranked in the top
five among university contributors who participate from around the world.

“It’s a big data problem,” says Kurt Kolasinski (Chemistry), who initiated this collaboration among WCU’s College of the Sciences and Mathematics,
the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs, and IS&T. For the past nine years,
Kolasinski has been involved in IBM’s project to utilize spare computing capacity.
He approached IS&T with the concept of adding to his existing cadre of 15 chemistry
lab computers to help find ways to combat COVID-19.

Participants’ computers are working on quantum chemistry computations when the screen
saver activates or when the computers are idle. Computations halt when the participant
uses the computer.

COVID-19 researchers need “thousands of years of computation time to model drug-virus
interactions and we have the computers idle in my lab” and elsewhere, he notes. From
a base of 60+ computers at WCU, generating more than two million points (again, in
the top five globally) we are off to a great start.

Anyone can join Team WCU by going to https://join.worldcommunitygrid.org?recruiterId=762146.

This press release was produced by West Chester University. The views expressed here are the author’s own.