COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium

History

2020: Creation of consortium

In March, 2020 IBM announced creation of the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium organization within which it is going to use capacities of supercomputers for fight against a coronavirus of new type. The consortium is created in cooperation with Department of science and technology policy of the USA (White House office of science and technology policy), the American Ministry of Energy and a number of research and educational institutions.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, NASA and other organizations will also become consortium members.

IBM announced creation of the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium organization within which it is going to use capacities of supercomputers for fight against a coronavirus of new type

Under the terms of the agreement, participants of partnership will involve 16 computing systems with a gross performance of 300 petaFLOPS from 775 thousand computing cores and 34 thousand graphic processors to help researchers worldwide better to understand COVID-19 and to treat patients.

Supercomputers will allow to carry out very large number of calculations in epidemiology, bioinformation science and molecular modeling, executing experiments on which handmade years and months when using traditional computing solutions leave.

The IBM Summit supercomputer began to help scientists to look for quicker medicine against COVID-19, analyzing a set of substances in virtual simulations. A system tries to define substances which can contact the virus components used for transfer of its genetic material to a cage. Researchers created model of such transfer in January, 2020.

Summit models interaction of atoms and particles in virus molecules with different substances. In total it checked 8000 substances from which noted 77. The real efficiency of the found perspective substances needs to be checked experimentally.^[1]

Notes