IBM says it is working closely with governments across the globe to put its technology and expertise to work, in efforts to help scientific and medical organisations accelerate the process of developing treatments and a potential cure for the COVID-19 pandemic. IT Web reports that in its latest move, IBM, in collaboration with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the US Department of Energy, has led the launch of the COVID-19 High Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium.
The consortium seeks to provide COVID-19 researchers worldwide with access to the world’s most powerful high-performance computing resources that can significantly advance the pace of scientific discovery, in the fight to stop the spread of COVID-19. According to IBM, the world’s most powerful computer processor, the IBM POWER9, will be used. Together with the consortium’s computing resources, it will bring forth an unprecedented amount of computing power − 16 systems with more than 330 petaflops, 775 000 CPU cores and 34 000 GPUs − to help researchers across the globe better understand COVID-19, its treatments and potential cures.
According to the report, IBM says, by pooling the super-computing capacity under a consortium of public-private partners − which include Microsoft, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Sandia National Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and Amazon Web Services − the body will offer extraordinary super-computing power to scientists, medical researchers and government agencies as they respond to and mitigate this global emergency.
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