Tech giants join forces with US government, offer 16 supercomputers to researchers in the fight against coronavirus

In a race to find cure for the deadly coronavirus that has killed over 15,00 people around the world, the US government, industry and academia have pooled efforts to combat the coronavirus (COVID-19) by offering researchers access to some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers from IBM, along with cloud-computing resources from Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Dubbed COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, the effort brings together the Federal government, industry, and academic leaders to provide access to the world’s most powerful high-performance computing resources in support of COVID-19 research. The supercomputer will offer over 330 petaflops, 775,000 CPU cores, 34,000 GPUs, and counting.

The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium is a unique private-public effort spearheaded by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the U.S. Department of Energy and IBM to bring together federal government, industry, and academic leaders who are volunteering free compute time and resources on their world-class machines. The supercomputer can be used for work like projecting the disease’s spread and modeling possible medicines.

According to the announcement, the Consortium partners include:

“Researchers are invited to submit COVID-19 related research proposals to the consortium via this online portal, which will then be reviewed for matching with computing resources from one of the partner institutions. An expert panel comprised of top scientists and computing researchers will work with proposers to assess the public health benefit of the work, with emphasis on projects that can ensure rapid results,” the Consortium said on its website.

Fighting COVID-19 will require extensive research in areas like bioinformatics, epidemiology, and molecular modeling to understand the threat we’re facing and form strategies to address it. This work demands a massive amount of computational capacity. The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium helps aggregate computing capabilities from the world’s most powerful and advanced computers to help COVID-19 researchers execute complex computational research programs to help fight the virus.