Dr Artem Babaian, a former post-doctoral student in medical genetics at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada and now a Banting Fellow at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, together with his mountain-climbing partner, Jeff Taylor, a UBC engineering student, knew that scientists had isolated 15,000 viruses that could infect humans, including the common cold, influenza, Ebola and, of course, most recently, the virus that causes COVID-19.
But what if there was a way to do more?
The plan for a project – that produced a supercomputer that identified a nine-fold increase in the number of viruses that could potentially sicken humans – was sketched out “on the back of a napkin” in early March 2020.
Designed with the help of UBC’s Cloud Innovation Centre (CIC), the supercomputer has the equivalent power of 22,500 central processing units. Its speed surprised even Babaian, who saw some of the results he’d hoped for starting to flash up on his laptop screen shortly after the supercomputer began processing the data.