Brenda Marie Rivers
The Trump administration has partnered with NVIDIA, semiconductor manufacturer AMD and the National Science Foundation-sponsored National Center for Atmospheric Research Wyoming Supercomputer Center in an effort to leverage high-performance computing to aid COVID-19 research.
Michael Kratsios, U.S. chief technology officer and 2020 Wash100 Award recipient, said in a tweet that AMD, NVIDIA and NWSC will join the HPC COVID-19 Consortium and work with the Department of Energy, NSF and other key industry players.
The consortium is composed of government, industry and academic members that volunteered to provide computing resources to support research in areas relevant to COVID-19 response including molecular modeling, bioinformatics and epidemiology.
The effort is led by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, DOE and IBM.
In a separate press release, NVIDIA said that it is currently helping researchers from the Arizona State University and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in studying photosynthetic organisms through simulation technology.
NVIDIA provided the GPU components for the Summit supercomputer at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to support the team’s research and development work.
The team plans to use the Summit-powered simulation technology to develop a neural network that uses machine learning to predict cell behavior.
