News

Cloud Giants Tackle COVID-19 With High Performance Computing

• By David Ramel
• 03/24/2020

The cloud computing giants have teamed up with the federal government and academia to provide High Performance Computing (HPC) resources to further research about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Industry partners in the new COVID-19 HPC Consortium include IBM, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft (Azure). They are teaming up with several major universities, federal agencies and Department of Energy National Laboratories.

"The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium is a unique private-public effort spearheaded by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the U.S. Department of Energy and IBM to bring together federal government, industry, and academic leaders who are volunteering free compute time and resources on their world-class machines," says the site, which is housed on IBM's Bluemix platform.

Computing resources used in the effort range from some of the biggest supercomputers available to small clusters of computing power. The resources are available via an online portal to researchers, who can apply for a review to determine potential resources available from one of the partner institutions.

"Fighting COVID-19 will require extensive research in areas like bioinformatics, epidemiology, and molecular modeling to understand the threat we're facing and form strategies to address it," the consortium said. "This work demands a massive amount of computational capacity. The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium helps aggregate computing capabilities from the world's most powerful and advanced computers to help COVID-19 researchers execute complex computational research programs to help fight the virus."

The project is supplying researchers with access to parts of 16 supercomputing systems, providing more than 330 petaflops, 775,000 CPU cores, and 34,000 GPUs.

"We're proud to support this critical work and stand ready with the compute power of AWS to help accelerate research and development efforts," said AWS exec Teresa Carlson in a news release. "Working together, government, business, and academic leaders can utilize the power of the cloud to advance the pace of scientific discovery and innovation, and help combat the COVID-19 virus."

Other industry efforts to help out with addressing the pandemic include the AI-powered COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) of scholarly literature about COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, and the Coronavirus group, requested by The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

"This dataset is intended to mobilize researchers to apply recent advances in natural language processing to generate new insights in support of the fight against this infectious disease," its site says. "The corpus will be updated weekly as new research is published in peer-reviewed publications and archival services like bioRxiv, medRxiv, and others."