Exscalate4Cov was a public-private consortium supported by the Horizon Europe program from the European Union, aimed at leveraging high-performance computing (HPC) as a response to the coronavirus pandemic.

[2] The Exsclate4Cov project, which stands for EXaSCale smArt pLatform Against paThogEns for Corona Virus,[1] was coordinated by Dompé Farmaceutici and involved 17 participants.

This approach helps in identifying potential hit candidates by predicting how different compounds will bind to the target protein, which will go further in the experimental validation.

[9] In an urgent computing scenario, such as a pandemic, where time to solution is critical, virtual screening is used to identify hit molecules for the latter stages of the drug discovery pipeline, such as lead optimization and clinical trial.

This project aimed to leverage the computational power of EU supercomputers to accelerate the discovery of effective treatments for the coronavirus.

[4] To hinge the computational power offered by HPC centers, the docking platform uses MPI[16] to scale multi-node and CUDA acceleration to take advantage of supercomputer's GPUs.

In November 2020, consortium members coordinated one of the largest virtual screening campaigns, harnessing the combined computational power of two supercomputers totaling 81 PFLOPS.

[5] Drug repurposing offers an interesting approach to address unmet clinical needs in case of urgent computing, due to pandemics.

Hence, repurposing existing drugs with established safety and toxicology profiles provides a significant advantage by saving time in identifying potential new treatments.

As a result of drug repositioning experiments, the E4C project identified raloxifene as a possible candidate to treat early-stage COVID-19 patients,[6][5] aiming to prevent clinical progression.

[4][6][5] The project's results also captured national interest in Italy, highlighted by various newspaper articles,[28][29][30] due to the use of Italian supercomputers during the pandemic.