Pushing the frontier of drug discovery with the world’s most powerful supercomputer

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier supercomputer. [Credit: ORNL]

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier, the world’s first exascale supercomputer with its dizzying 1.1 exaflop speed, is a game-changer for scientific domains ranging from drug discovery to material science and oceanography. The computer holds the top spot on the TOP500 list, an independent ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. “It’s like having a million laptops going into one core,” says Niven R. Narain, Ph.D., CEO of the biopharmaceutical company BPGbio. The company has forged an exclusive partnership with Oak Ridge that enables them to harness the staggering power of Frontier for drug discovery. “Things that historically would have taken us six to nine months to process, it’s like nine hours,” Narain said.

Access to Frontier “changed our company overnight,” Narain said. With…

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Supercomputer-based Bayesian approach to AI pays dividends for BPGbio

In an AI hype-filled biopharma industry, one company is taking a back-to-basics yet supercomputer-powered approach — using Bayesian analysis on massive patient datasets to guide drug discovery. The company crunches trillions of data points per patient. “It’s massive, which is why we use a supercomputer,” said Niven R. Narain, Ph.D., BPGbio CEO. The company has an exclusive relationship with Oak Ridge National Labs, using its Frontier supercomputer to perform complex computational tasks, including the analysis of multi-omics data, the development of predictive models, and the simulation of biological systems. Frontier is hailed as the world’s first exascale supercomputer, meaning it can perform more than 1 quintillion calculations per second.

BPGbio’s AI-powered platform, known as NAi Interrogative Biology, illustrates its approach to drug and diagnostic discovery. The platform includes a lmassive biobank of multi-omi…

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