IBM to help direct supercomputing power for coronavirus research

PanARMENIAN.Net - IBM on Sunday, March22 announced an initiative to increase access to high performance computing for groups researching and fighting the novel coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, CNN reports.

IBM (IBM) partnered with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Department of Energy to create the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. The effort, which IBM started just last week, is expected to harness powerful high performance computing, or "supercomputing," resources that will massively increase the speed and capacity of coronavirus-related research.

"How can we find new treatments? Or ultimately vaccines and a cure?" Director of IBM Research Dario Gil asked in an interview with CNN Business. "Those are the areas we'll be looking at ... We're going to bring an unprecedented amount of computing power" to address coronavirus.

The system will harness 16 supercomputing systems from IBM, national laboratories, several universities, Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOGL), Microsoft (MSFT) and others. Computing power will be provided via remote access to researchers whose projects are approved by the consortium's leadership board, which will be comprised of tech industry leaders and White House and Energy Department officials. The group plans to begin accepting research proposals through an online portal that will go live Sunday evening.

Supercomputers can solve calculations and run experiments that, if done on traditional computing systems or by hand, would take months or years.

The consortium will also connect researchers with top computational scientists to ensure the machines are used as efficiently and effectively as possible. The services and computing power will be provided for free to researchers.