COVID-19 HPC Consortium to Identify Near-Term Therapies for Patients Under Phase 2

The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium has entered into the second phase of operation to focus on research projects that seek to identify near-term treatments to help improve patient outcomes within the next six months. 

The consortium said Monday it will prioritize research projects focused on using large datasets to understand and model patient response to the virus, validating models of vaccine response from several clinical trials and assessing combination treatments using repurposed molecules. 

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy partnered with IBM, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to launch the COVID-19 HPC Consortium in March to advance research into the new coronavirus using supercomputers. 

The consortium has now 43 members and its computing capacity has increased from 330 petaflops to 600 petaflops supporting more than 90 research initiatives. 

Those projects include the work of Microsoft and Duke University on a multisplitting device for ventilators and an initiative of Amazon Web Services and PostEra to speed up research on COVID-19 drugs.