Italy is leading Exscalate4CoV (E4C), the public-private consortium receiving 3 mln Euros from the European Commission’s H2020 tender for projects to fight the Coronavirus pandemic. The tender assigned a total of 47.5 million euro to 17 projects (EC press release is here). E4C project is leveraging EU’s supercomputing resources coupling them with some of the continent’s best life-science research labs to counter international pandemics faster and more efficiently.
The E4C consortium, coordinated by Dompé Farmaceutici, is composed by 18 institutions form seven European countries. Politecnico di Milano is one of the key partners of the Exscalate4CoV (E4C). At the core of the project is the Exscalate platform (EXaSCale smArt pLatform Against paThogEns) developed by Dompé, Politecnico di Milano and CINECA. Exscalate is at present the most powerful (and cost-efficient) intelligent supercomputing platform in the world, leveraging a "chemical library" of 500 billion molecules, thanks to a processing capacity of more than 3 million molecules per second.
The POLIMI team is composed of prof. Cristina Silvano and prof. Gianluca Palermo. They are investigating autotuning techniques for high-performance computing, that they’ve applied to accelerate drug discovery in the ANTAREX project against the Zika virus.

An interview to Professor Silvano published by IlSole24ore is available at: 
https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/virus-supercalcolo-caccia-terapia-testeremo-500-miliardi-molecole-ADlffsC

An interview to Prof. Cristina Silvano and Dr. Andrea Beccari published by Le Scienze is available at: 
https://www.lescienze.it/news/2020/03/18/news/coronavirus_progetto_farmaci_supercomputer-4699342/


For more information, please see:
EC press release: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_386
EC Coronavirus Factsheet: https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/research_and_innovation/research_by_area/documents/ec_rtd_coronavirus_factsheet.pdf
EXSCALATE project website: https://www.exscalate.eu/en/
Exscalate4CoV: https://www.exscalate.eu/en/projects.html
ANTAREX4ZIKA: https://www.exscalate.eu/en/projects.html
ANTAREX project website: www.antarex-project.eu
EC press release on ANTAREX4ZIKA: https://cordis.europa.eu/news/rcn/131009/en?WT.mc_id=exp