The Assembly of a Computing Platform for Studying Protein Inhibitors Against COVID-19 Replication

A new highly efficient GPU-equipped computing platform for studying the molecular inhibition mechanisms of the Sars-Cov-2 virus by natural compounds and aptamers has been installed and configured. Studies will be carried out by means of molecular dynamics methods and programs. For this reason, we have assembled specific hardware components into a 4U rack, together with a NVIDIA RTX 3060 GPU for speeding up molecular dynamics calculations and visualizing their outcomes. In fact, not only computational resources, in terms of computing power and execution times, are needed by molecular dynamics programs adopted by us, but also a system allowing the rendering and visualization of large biomolecules and their trajectories, such as viruses and proteins, represents a key factor for our work. Details about platform implementation and preliminary tests carried out are discussed.