US Enlists 16 Supercomputers to Help Researchers Create Coronavirus Treatments

The US government is enlisting 16 supercomputers to help scientists come up with treatments to combat the coronavirus. 

On Sunday, the White House announced the “COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium,” which will pave the way for the scientific community to use some of the country’s top supercomputers to study the ongoing pandemic. 

“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,” US Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios said in a announcement. 

Getting a supercomputer to fight a medical disease may sound strange.

But the hardware is capable of accurately simulating how a virus will behave, and what vulnerabilities it may possess.  

The world’s fastest supercomputer, Summit, has already been simulating COVID-19 to find drug therapies that can potentially neutralize the illness.

Using the machine, researchers have so far identified 77 “small-molecule” drug compounds that might be able to prevent the coronavirus strain from binding to human cells during the infection process. 

Summit, which is based in Tennessee, will now be among the supercomputers enlisted into the consortium.

IBM, NASA, Amazon Web Services, and other supercomputing labs across the country are also donating their machines to the cause.

Researchers will only get access to a portion of computing power from all the machines involved.  But in total, the combined computing power is theoretically capable of completing 330 petaflops (one quadrillion operations per second) by using 775,000 CPU cores and 34,000 GPUs. 

“Now we must scale, and IBM will work with our consortium partners to evaluate proposals from researchers around the world and provide access to this supercomputing capacity for the projects that can have the most immediate impact,” Dario Gil, Director of IBM Research, said in a statement. 

The consortium is inviting scientists to submit proposals through an online portal.

The results from the research will then be published in open scientific publications. 

Consumers can also contribute to a related research effort called [email protected], which borrows the spare computing power from your PC to help scientists simulate and study the coronavirus.

Thanks to a surge in volunteers, the project now has access to more than 474 petaflops of computing power.

The US government is enlisting 16 supercomputers to help scientists come up with treatments to combat the coronavirus. 

On Sunday, the White House announced the “COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium,” which will pave the way for the scientific community to use some of the country’s top supercomputers to study the ongoing pandemic. 

“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,” US Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios said in a announcement. 

Getting a supercomputer to fight a medical disease may sound strange.

But the hardware is capable of accurately simulating how a virus will behave, and what vulnerabilities it may possess.  

The world’s fastest supercomputer, Summit, has already been simulating COVID-19 to find drug therapies that can potentially neutralize the illness.

Using the machine, researchers have so far identified 77 “small-molecule” drug compounds that might be able to prevent the coronavirus strain from binding to human cells during the infection process. 

Summit, which is based in Tennessee, will now be among the supercomputers enlisted into the consortium.

IBM, NASA, Amazon Web Services, and other supercomputing labs across the country are also donating their machines to the cause.

Researchers will only get access to a portion of computing power from all the machines involved.  But in total, the combined computing power is theoretically capable of completing 330 petaflops (one quadrillion operations per second) by using 775,000 CPU cores and 34,000 GPUs. 

“Now we must scale, and IBM will work with our consortium partners to evaluate proposals from researchers around the world and provide access to this supercomputing capacity for the projects that can have the most immediate impact,” Dario Gil, Director of IBM Research, said in a statement. 

The consortium is inviting scientists to submit proposals through an online portal.

The results from the research will then be published in open scientific publications. 

Consumers can also contribute to a related research effort called [email protected], which borrows the spare computing power from your PC to help scientists simulate and study the coronavirus.

Thanks to a surge in volunteers, the project now has access to more than 474 petaflops of computing power.