Case Study: Oak Ridge National Laboratory accelerates COVID-19 drug discovery with Google for Education and Google Cloud

Oak Ridge National Laboratory screens 1.3 billion compounds in less than a day with Google for Education

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) faced the challenge of accelerating the discovery of drug therapies for COVID-19, as traditional methods are prohibitively slow and expensive. To address this urgent need, ORNL partnered with Google for Education, using Google Cloud resources and research credits, to form a multidisciplinary team focused on computational drug discovery.

The solution implemented by Google for Education involved combining the power of ORNL's Summit supercomputer with Google Cloud GPUs to run a high-throughput virtual screening pipeline. This allowed the team to screen 1.3 billion compounds in under 20 hours, a world record, dramatically accelerating the research process. The results were shared with experimentalists for testing, advancing the development of potential COVID-19 treatments.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory