COVID-19 has been taking over what feels like everything for the past month or now. Nearly every normal way of life has been disrupted leaving us all to figure out new routines in our day to day lives. For some of us, this has meant distant contact with those who we normally regularly see and trying to manage a relationship with technology. For others, this means homeschooling kids while trying to work from home and maintain some sort of sanity. At least there’s a plus in wearing yoga or sweatpants all day, right? Then are those who are still going to work, because their job is considered essential. And thank goodness they are, because things could get really ugly if there wasn’t any order, people to go to for help or food readily available. Regardless of your situation, we are all united in wanting to find a cure and/or vaccination for COVID-19, whether it’s for our own safety, our kids or our elderly parents, friends and neighbors.
It’s impossible to know just how long we will be operating differently as a nation and world, but we are now, more than ever, connected through and reliant on technology. One of the most notable ways we’re relying on technology is through our phones. With things like FaceTime, What’sApp, Skype, Microsoft Teams etc. there has never been an easier time to not only hear the voices of loved ones, but see their faces too. Technology has also been instrumental in allowing a lot of adults to work from home. Conferences calls and emails can all be done remotely. While technology doesn’t replace a kiss on grandma’s cheek or a warm hug from a best friend, it is a potential solution for helping us find a vaccination for COVID-19 in the form of supercomputers, and you can bet they do a lot of math.
The word supercomputer might make you think of vocabulary regularly used by nearly any character from the Big Bang Theory, but they are regularly used to compile data quickly for various things like weather forecasting, molecular modeling, oil and gas exploration etc. They are much of the reason the weather app on your phone allows you to dress appropriately… in most circumstances. Colorado is still unpredictable sometimes. Supercomputers are computers that operate with higher function and purpose than regular computers we use at home, work and in school. They have the computational ability to analyze and crunch numbers very quickly, which means they are basically math machines! They work so fast and so hard that their performance is measured on an entirely different scale than general purpose computers. Their measurement of floating-point operations per second is measured in FLOPS instead of MIPS.
With the ability to think so fast, it’s no wonder why academic institutions and federal laboratories are being brought together to establish the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, which is a group of supercomputers and the staff that run and analyze their output, to help identify or create compounds that might prevent or treat coronavirus. Calculations that would take normal computers one month, take supercomputers about a day. In the instance of coronavirus, the physical properties (what they’re made of and their shape) of the proteins a virus were identified first, before sending supercomputers to work. One key viral protein of this virus is called a spike protein, which gives scientists a good start in helping search through data bases of existing drugs that will block the virus. Again, supercomputers to the rescue to help with figuring out the probability of compounds that might work.
So, here we are, knowing that COVID-19 has a spike protein thanks to the help of all the math supercomputers can do. But what next? Biology. Let’s go into a mini lesson, shall we? For those of us that aren’t scientist for a living, think back to science classes with labs where you experimented with different items in petri dishes. That’s basically the stage we’re at now. Normal, healthy cells are put in containers, then they are introduced to the drug, then they are introduced to the coronavirus. All three of the substances have a party in the same container for a few days before they are visited by the police to break it up. Once the party is broken up, the normal cells are examined to see if they’ve infected or not. If they haven’t, scientist may do a little happy dance (or not, but that’s how we imagine it) and the particular drug might move onto the next stage of being tested further before being put into use on people.
As you read this, many, many calculations are happening on supercomputers to try and get better estimates of what drugs might work. We, at Mathnasium of Cherry Creek, want to give a huge thank you to the people (and supercomputers!) in the government-academia-industry triad that is coming together to help the rest of humanity. We also want to give a shout out to science, and of course, math. What would we do without math?!
