DeepSpeed4Science Initiative: Enabling Large-Scale Scientific Discovery through Sophisticated AI System Technologies

In the upcoming decade, deep learning may revolutionize the natural sciences, enhancing our capacity to model and predict natural occurrences. This could herald a new era of scientific exploration, bringing significant advancements across sectors from drug development to renewable energy. To answer this call, we present DeepSpeed4Science initiative (deepspeed4science.ai) which aims to build unique capabilities through AI system technology innovations to help domain experts to unlock today's biggest science mysteries. By leveraging DeepSpeed's current technology pillars (training, inference and compression) as base technology enablers, DeepSpeed4Science will create a new set of AI system technologies tailored for accelerating scientific discoveries by addressing their unique complexity beyond the common technical approaches used for accelerating generic large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we showcase the early progress we made with DeepSpeed4Science in addressing two of the critical system challenges in structural biology research.

Achieving 100X faster simulations of complex biological phenomena by coupling ML to HPC ensembles

The use of ML methods to dynamically steer ensemble-based simulations promises significant improvements in the performance of scientific applications. We present DeepDriveMD, a tool for a range of prototypical ML-driven HPC simulation scenarios, and use it to quantify improvements in the scientific performance of ML-driven ensemble-based applications. We discuss its design and characterize its performance. Motivated by the potential for further scientific improvements and applicability to more sophisticated physical systems, we extend the design of DeepDriveMD to support stream-based communication between simulations and learning methods. It demonstrates a 100x speedup to fold proteins, and performs 1.6x more simulations per unit time, improving resource utilization compared to the sequential framework. Experiments are performed on leadership-class platforms, at scales of up to O(1000) nodes, and for production workloads. We establish DeepDriveMD as a high-performance framework for ML-driven HPC simulation scenarios, that supports diverse simulation and ML back-ends, and which enables new scientific insights by improving length- and time-scale accessed.

Pandemic Drugs at Pandemic Speed: Accelerating COVID-19 Drug Discovery with Hybrid Machine Learning- and Physics-based Simulations on High Performance Computers

The race to meet the challenges of the global pandemic has served as a reminder that the existing drug discovery process is expensive, inefficient and slow. There is a major bottleneck screening the vast number of potential small molecules to shortlist lead compounds for antiviral drug development. New opportunities to accelerate drug discovery lie at the interface between machine learning methods, in this case developed for linear accelerators, and physics-based methods. The two in silico methods, each have their own advantages and limitations which, interestingly, complement each other. Here, we present an innovative method that combines both approaches to accelerate drug discovery. The scale of the resulting workflow is such that it is dependent on high performance computing. We have demonstrated the applicability of this workflow on four COVID-19 target proteins and our ability to perform the required large-scale calculations to identify lead compounds on a variety of supercomputers.

Artificial intelligence techniques for integrative structural biology of intrinsically disordered proteins

We outline recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques for integrative structural biology of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDP) ensembles. IDPs challenge the traditional protein structure-function paradigm by adapting their conformations in response to specific binding partners leading them to mediate diverse, and often complex cellular functions such as biological signaling, self organization and compartmentalization. Obtaining mechanistic insights into their function can therefore be challenging for traditional structural determination techniques. Often, scientists have to rely on piecemeal evidence drawn from diverse experimental techniques to characterize their functional mechanisms. Multiscale simulations can help bridge critical knowledge gaps about IDP structure function relationships - however, these techniques also face challenges in resolving emergent phenomena within IDP conformational ensembles. We posit that scalable statistical inference techniques can effectively integrate information gleaned from multiple experimental techniques as well as from simulations, thus providing access to atomistic details of these emergent phenomena.

DeepDriveMD: Deep-Learning Driven Adaptive Molecular Simulations for Protein Folding

Simulations of biological macromolecules play an important role in understanding the physical basis of a number of complex processes such as protein folding. Even with increasing computational power and evolution of specialized architectures, the ability to simulate protein folding at atomistic scales still remains challenging. This stems from the dual aspects of high dimensionality of protein conformational landscapes, and the inability of atomistic molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to sufficiently sample these landscapes to observe folding events. Machine learning/deep learning (ML/DL) techniques, when combined with atomistic MD simulations offer the opportunity to potentially overcome these limitations by: (1) effectively reducing the dimensionality of MD simulations to automatically build latent representations that correspond to biophysically relevant reaction coordinates (RCs), and (2) driving MD simulations to automatically sample potentially novel conformational states based on these RCs. We examine how coupling DL approaches with MD simulations can fold small proteins effectively on supercomputers. In particular, we study the computational costs and effectiveness of scaling DL-coupled MD workflows by folding two prototypical systems, viz., Fs-peptide and the fast-folding variant of the villin head piece protein. We demonstrate that a DL driven MD workflow is able to effectively learn latent representations and drive adaptive simulations. Compared to traditional MD-based approaches, our approach achieves an effective performance gain in sampling the folded states by at least 2.3x. Our study provides a quantitative basis to understand how DL driven MD simulations, can lead to effective performance gains and reduced times to solution on supercomputing resources.