IBM Leads Massive Supercomputing Consortium to Accelerate COVID-19 Research
IBM unites with government agencies and tech giants to offer over 330 petaflops of computing power to scientists fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. The newly formed consortium evaluates research proposals to fast-track the development of treatments and vaccines.
IBM coordinates a massive effort to provide over 330 petaflops of computing power to scientists researching COVID-19. The company anticipates that this immense capacity helps researchers develop algorithms to assess how the virus progresses and model potential therapies in pursuit of a vaccine. This initiative follows the launch of IBM's 2020 Call for Code Global Challenge.
The COVID-19 High Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium brings together a powerful coalition of partners, including the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the U.S. Department of Energy, national laboratories, NASA, and major tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and HPE. IBM states that it helps evaluate proposals from research institutions and grants computing access to projects that promise the most immediate impact. Teams receive access to 16 systems with a combined 775,000 processor cores and 34,000 GPUs.
These high-performance computing systems allow researchers to run massive numbers of calculations in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling. Experiments that take years to complete by hand or months on traditional platforms now move at an unprecedented pace. Researchers apply through a dedicated website to access these powerful resources and collaborate with leading data scientists to accelerate their critical work.