Covid-19 HPC Consortium gives science access to most powerful supercomputer

A consortium consisting of IBM, Amazon Web Service, Google Cloud, Microsoft and the US Department of Energy, among others, will give scientists access to supercomputers and cloud services for research into the new coronavirus and the Covid-19 disease.

Collectively, the consortium’s sixteen supercomputers provide access to 330 petaflops, 775,000 CPU cores and 34,000 GPUs, the website of the Covid-19 High Performance Computing Consortium states. Much of the computing power comes from the Oak Ridge Summit, the world’s most powerful computer with peak performance of 200 petaflops. The consortium calls on organizations to participate and make computing resources available to science.

Researchers who want computing power for projects related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the Covid-19 disease can submit a proposal. The consortium then considers the potential impact, feasibility, requirements and period of the research. The parties that are needed then work together with the research team to access the supercomputers and cloud services.

The consortium is thinking of research in the fields of bioinformatics, epidemiology and molecular modelling, among other things. Amazon, Google and Microsoft help researchers deploy their cloud services where necessary. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute also contribute their expertise. The project must guarantee that computing power is not an obstacle in research into the new corona virus.

Last weekend, the Folding@Home distributed computing project announced that it delivered a total of 470 petaflops of computing power. Responsible for the computing power are more than four hundred thousand volunteers who use unused computing power from their systems.