The White House has joined with a number of tech companies to launch a public/private consortium aimed at combating covid-19 (coronavirus). President Donald Trump made the announcement during a coronavirus task force press conference, TechCrunch said. The White House will be a member of the consortium, as will the Department of Energy and IBM, plus Google, Amazon and Microsoft, and a number of academic institutions, including the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL), Argonne National Lab (ANL), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Sandia National Laboratory (SNL), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).
No financial details were provided.
In a blog, IBM Research head Dario Gil gave some details, saying the goal will to bring supercomputers into the global fight against the virus. The Covid-19 High Performance Computing Consortium will bring a total of 330 petaflops to different projects, for epidemiology, bioinformatics and molecular modeling. IBM said there will be 775,000 CPU cores and over 34,000 GPUs to help researchers everywhere better understand the virus, its treatments and potential cures. IBM and its partners will toghether evaluate proposals and help with high-performance computing resources.
AWS has already dedicated USD 20 million to support covid-19 research while Microsoft has already announced a number of different initiatives, mostly to help businesses cope with the effects of the crisis. Google announced the launch of a coronavirus website ( google.com/covid19) aimed at the US and Alphabet’s Verily is helping Bay Area residents find testing sites. Cisco has committed USD 225 million to help fight the virus, and to alleviate its impact.
