What Dompé will do with the Leonardo supercomputer
The Leonardo supercomputer, one of the most powerful in the world, was inaugurated today at the Bologna Technopole and Dompé Farmaceutici will be the first company to use its computing resources. All the details
One of the most powerful intelligent supercomputing platforms in the world is made in Italy. This is the Leonardo supercomputer and Dompé Farmaceutici is the first private company to sign an agreement to use it.
The goal is to accelerate new drug development and early pandemic response through its proprietary Exscalate platform that combines artificial intelligence and supercomputing.
THE AGREEMENT
The Milanese company Dompé has signed an agreement for the use of the computing resources of the Leonardo supercomputer, the fourth most powerful in the world, inaugurated today at the Bologna Technopole and managed by the Cineca Consortium.
WHAT DOMPÉ WILL DO WITH THE SUPERCOMPUTER
Dompé, which already used the Marconi100 predecessor, will now use the power of the new machine to accelerate the development of new drugs and the early response to pandemics through its proprietary Exscalate platform which combines artificial intelligence and supercomputing.
“Today, the repercussions of supercomputing applications are much closer to our lives than we think,” said the president of Cineca , Francesco Ubertini.
“Leonardo's contribution, lifeblood for the scientific community, is in fact equally precious and decisive for the industrial system and for society. Leonardo has been designed and configured both to support researchers in traditional research fields and to face new challenges. Among these, – continues Ubertini, agreeing with Dompé – accelerating research against pandemics and developing new drugs, which is the main objective of the agreement signed on the sidelines of the inauguration of Leonardo with Dompé farmaceutici".
One million computation hours have already been allocated to Exscalate, which places it as the most advanced tool globally for supporting computational chemistry in the biopharmaceutical field.
FUTURE PROJECTS
Furthermore, the agreement paves the way for Cineca to build a new Tier 1 Data Center in Naples, where Dompé has located the headquarters of the Exscalate development center. The new center is part of the national supercomputing development strategies under the National Center for High Performance Computing, Big Data and Quantum Computing project.
THE EXSCALATE PLATFORM
Among other things, precisely in the Dompé laboratories in Naples, according to what Corriere Comunicazioni writes , the Exscalate team "will exploit the power of Leonardo to reduce the analysis times of large libraries of molecules by hundreds of times, allowing for faster and more effective responses to future pandemic risks and cut the simulation times of how a molecule interacts with a biological tissue by 1,000 times (from micro to milliseconds). But above all, the use of Leonardo paves the way for the rapid creation of millions of 'synthetic' molecules which, since they are completely digital, can be tested on the computer even before being produced in the laboratory, cutting the development times and costs of new drugs" .
Indeed, as Andrea R. Beccari, who leads the Exscalate team, explained in Nature , “the virtual screening platform, Exscalate, leverages high-performance computing, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to perform tests and design in silico drugs . Not only does the platform have unprecedented speed, quality and scalability, but it is also open to the scientific community to foster innovation."
DOMPÉ'S WARNING ON TECHNOLOGY AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
"Public-private collaboration is a fundamental and indispensable condition for promoting the development of biomedical research, to the benefit of everyone, from the patient to the NHS, to pharmaceutical companies as bearers of value for well-being and health protection", commented Sergio Dompé , president of the pharmaceutical company of the same name.
“Today – he added – high-performance computing, Artificial Intelligence and Data technologies are now one of the fundamental R&D tools – as Nobel Prize winner Arieh Warshel, scientific advisor of Exscalate, recently underlined, but they will soon become the main tool. As a country we must pay attention and continue to invest in this direction”.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/ecco-cosa-fara-dompe-con-il-supercomputer-leonardo/ on Thu, 24 Nov 2022 14:03:34 +0000.