Trump turns to supercomputers

The Government of the U.S has announced the creation of the Covid-19 high-performance computing consortium to offer supercomputers to researchers of the new coronavirus.

This consortium is headed by the United States Department of Energy and the IBM company and includes other technology companies such as Google Cloud, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Amazon Web Services.

Thanks to this initiative, the companies will offer researchers from the Covid-19 around the world “access to the world’s most powerful high-performance computing resources” to help advance the fight against the virus, the White House said in a statement.

IBM has stated that the consortium will provide 16 systems with over 330 petaflops, 775,000 CPU cores, and 24,000 GPUs so that researchers can “better understand Covid-19, its treatments and possible cures”.

Supercomputers will allow researchers to perform a large number of calculations in epidemiology, bioinformatics and molecular modeling, something that would take years to be carried out manually or months if it were done with slower and more traditional computing platforms, the company explained in a statement.

“By bringing together supercomputing capacity under one consortium, we can deliver extraordinary supercomputing power to scientists, medical researchers, and government agencies to respond to and stem this global emergency,” IBM stressed.

The US company has already used its supercomputers for projects related to the coronavirus, such as Summit, located in Oak Ridge (United States), which has been used to testing over 8,000 drug compounds and its effect as a treatment against Covid-19.

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