Tech Giants Unite With National Labs And Universities, Using Supercomputers To Fight COVID-19

A bunch of tech giants including Google, IBM, and Microsoft along with national labs and universities has teamed up, establishing COVID-19 High Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium. The partnership is meant to provide supercomputing resources for scientists to find a way of combating the coronavirus pandemic.

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This help will allow scientists to create thousands of models to better understand the pandemic as well as to characterize the coronavirus and devise drug treatments and potential vaccines. The consortium’s organizers will provide 16 supercomputers to researchers along with a community to engage in the COVID-19 fight together.

According to IBM’s Data Centric Solutions VP Micheal Rosenfield, the consortium benefit the fight by speeding up and accelerating the scientific discovery required to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus, understand it, and eventually kill it. He added that supercomputers can perform tasks in minutes or hours while those may take regular computers days, months, even years.

Right now, the consortium includes supercomputers from tech firms including IBM, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, from universities like Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and MIT, as well as Department of Energy National Laboratories including Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Lawrence Livermore, along with NASA and the National Science Foundation. They are encouraging researchers who are working on COVID-19 to submit their proposals via a central portal and a steering committee will review them to connect researchers with suitable supercomputing resources.

The supercomputers will help scientists understand the coronavirus’ structure and the differences between SARS-Cov-2 and other coronaviruses. Supercomputers have already proven their merits in fighting the pandemic on this front, for example, Summit allowed researchers to form 8,000 potential molecules that could fight COVID-19 and narrow down to 17 molecules. Meanwhile, other scientists can use these supercomputers to create simulations of how the COVI-19 pandemic could play out, when it will peak, how long it will last, and what places will need supplies the most.

Researchers are submitting proposals to study the coronavirus using this supercomputing resource. According to Rosenfield, the consortium gives researchers a chance to collaborate in ways never ever seen before. And this encourages scientists of different specialties to team up and tackle the problem, to use their creativity in incorporating supercomputers to their research.

Let's hope that this will speed up the process overall and help us escape this COVID-19 nightmare as soon as possible.

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