“The National Science Foundation is pleased to join the COVID-19 HPC Consortium,” said France Cordova, director of the National Science Foundation. “Frontera and other NSF-funded advanced computing resources will enable the nation’s science and engineering community to pursue data science, computational modeling, and artificial intelligence approaches to help us accelerate our understanding of COVID-19 and strategies for responding to the pandemic.”
According to Monday’s statement from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the new COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium aims to provide researchers with access to the world’s most powerful high-performance computing resources in the fight to stop the virus.
“America is coming together to fight COVID-19, and that means unleashing the full capacity of our 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,” said Michael Kratsios, U.S. Chief Technology Officer.
The computing systems available through this Consortium can process massive numbers of calculations related to bioinformatics, epidemiology, and molecular modeling, helping scientists develop answers to complex scientific questions about COVID-19 in hours or days versus weeks or months.
The public-private consortium, spearheaded by The White House, the U.S. Department of Energy, and IBM, features leading tech organizations that have volunteered free compute time and resources on their machines.
The list includes IBM, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rensselaer, U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratories, including Argonne, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Sandia, as well as federal agencies such as NASA and the National Science Foundation.
Christopher Hill, head of MIT’s research computing infrastructure said 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,” he said. “This will be a team effort, and we hope our actions will inspire others to throw their computing power and brainpower at the virus.”
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