IBM announced the formation of the Covid-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, in collaboration with the US Department of Energy and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The new union will add the computing power of some of the world's most advanced supercomputers and allocate resources to teams developing treatments and vaccines for the new coronavirus. The project brings together 16 supercomputer systems, representing 330 petaflops of processing power, 775,000 processor cores, and 34,000 GPUs, which will be used to significantly reduce the time required to model chemical compounds. Other participating members include NASA, MIT, Amazon, Google and a host of leading US research laboratories and foundations.
Coronavirus Research
IBM hopes that the use of supercomputers to augment research processes will greatly accelerate the scientific discoveries needed to quell the coronavirus pandemic. According to the tech giant, the computing power managed by the consortium will be used to develop predictive models to map disease progression and prototype potential therapies and vaccines. “These high-performance computing systems allow researchers to perform a large number of computations in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling. These experiments would take years if done by hand, or months if done on slower traditional computing platforms,” said Dario Gill, director of IBM Research. The announcement of the new consortium builds on work already underway at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where IBM Summit, known as the world's most powerful supercomputer, is working to identify compounds that could be used in the fight . against coronavirus. Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services has launched its own initiative to conduct Covid-19 research, diagnostics, and testing. The firm has committed €20 million, open to accredited research institutions and private entities using AWS to support research efforts. And outside the US, Chinese tech firm Huawei has announced the development of an AI-assisted diagnostic service that can automatically assess lung structure and function, alleviating a shortage of doctors qualified to perform such tests. -19 is from the Chinese province of Wuhan. To date, more than 340,000 cases have been recorded and around 15,000 have died.