White House partnered with technology leaders to support COVID-19 research

The White House launched the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium in order to provide COVID-19 researchers worldwide with access to the powerful high-performance computing resources against Coronavirus. This consortium brings 16 systems with more than 330 petaflops, 775,000 CPU cores, 34,000 GPUs, and counting together.

Coming together to fight COVID-19

This public-private consortium, spearheaded by The White House, the U.S. Department of Energy, and IBM, consists of technology leaders like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratories including Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and National Science Foundation, NASA.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have also taken part in COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium. Michael Kratsios, U.S. Chief Technology Officer talked about the consortium:

“America is coming together to fight COVID-19, and that means unleashing the full capacity of our world-class supercomputers to rapidly advance scientific research for treatments and a vaccine. We thank the private sector and academic leaders who are joining the federal government as part of the Trump Administration’s whole-of-America response.” 

Christopher Hill, head of MIT’s research computing infrastructure, talked about this partnership,

“Computing and AI have a major role to play in bringing Covid-19 under control. We want to do our part by making MIT’s two most powerful machines, Satori and TX-GAIA, available to researchers who are racing to understand the virus, model the outbreak, and accelerate drug discovery and design. This will be a team effort, and we hope our actions will inspire others to throw their computing power and brain power at the virus.”

According to the White House’s announcement, researchers will submit COVID-19 related research proposals to the consortium via the online portal. This online portal will then be reviewed and matched with computing resources from one of the partner institutions. Dario Gil, Director of IBM Research said,

“Accelerating the process of discovery to unlock treatments and a cure for COVID-19 is of vital importance to us all. By bringing together the world’s most advanced supercomputers and matching them with the best ideas and expertise, this consortium can drive real progress in this global fight. IBM is proud to have helped kick-start this important effort.”