Brenda Marie Rivers
Several U.S. government, commercial and academic organizations have vowed to provide computing resources to support COVID-19 research and development efforts worldwide through a newly formed public-private consortium.
COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium members pledged to offer HPC expertise to researchers working in areas such as epidemiology, bioinformatics and molecular modeling as part of efforts to stop the pandemic, the White House said Monday.
Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Hewlett Packard Enterprise signed up for the initiative.
Public sector participants are the National Science Foundation, NASA and five Department of Energy-backed national laboratories.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute serve as consortium representatives from the academic sector.
“America is coming together to fight COVID-19, and that means unleashing the full capacity of our world-class supercomputers to rapidly advance scientific research for treatments and a vaccine," said Michael Kratsios, U.S. chief technology officer and a 2020 Wash100 awardee.
Teresa Carlson, vice president of worldwide public sector at AWS and 2020 Wash100 Award recipient, said the government, business and academic sectors can harness the power of cloud technology to accelerate scientific discovery and the fight against the novel coronavirus.
The consortium will accept research proposals via its online portal.
