A government-funded research initiative has enlisted the assistance of cloud heavyweights like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and others to stop the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19).
The new COVID-19 HPC Consortium is designed to harness high-performance computing (HPC), resources to advance research on the coronavirus pandemic. Its members include AWS and Microsoft, IBM and Google, and major universities.
The group’s website is hosted on IBM’s Bluemix platform. It describes itself as “a unique private and public effort spearheaded by U.S. Department of Energy and IBM” to bring together federal, industry, and academic leaders who offer free compute time and resources for their world-class machines.
The computing resources used in this effort range from the largest supercomputers to small clusters of computing speed. Researchers can access the resources via an online portal. They can request a review to determine if there are any resources available at one of the partner institutions.
The consortium stated that to defeat COVID-19, extensive research in areas such as bioinformatics and epidemiology will be required to understand the threat and formulate strategies to combat it. This work requires a huge amount of computational power. COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium combines computing capabilities from the most advanced and powerful computers in the world to aid COVID-19 researchers with complex computational research programs.
Researchers will have access to parts of 16 supercomputing platforms, which provide more than 330 petaflops, 7755,000 CPU cores, and 34,000 GPUs.
Teresa Carlson, AWS executive, stated in a press release that “We are proud to support this important work and stand ready to use the compute power of AWS for help accelerate research and develop efforts.” “Government, business, academic and academic leaders can use the power of cloud to accelerate scientific discovery and innovation and combat the COVID-19 virus by working together.”
Other industry initiatives to address the pandemic include the AI powered COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, (CORD-19), of scholarly literature about COVID-19; the $20 million AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative for better COVID-19 testing; SARS-CoV-2; and the Coronavirus group, as requested by The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The group’s website states that “this dataset is intended to mobilize scientists to apply recent advances to natural language processing to generate insights in support of fighting this infectious disease.” “The corpus will be refreshed weekly as new research is published by peer-reviewed publications, archival services such as bioRxiv and medRxiv and others.”
