Unleashing the supercomputing resources on the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, White House’s COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium (HPC) has joined hands with Microsoft in the fight against the global pandemic. In addition to Microsoft, White House is also teaming up with some of the other major technology players such as Amazon, IBM, and Google.
White House steps up fight against COVID-19
The COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium is a private-public research effort in the fight to stop the virus, led by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
U.S. Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios wrote:
“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. We thank the private sector and academic leaders who are joining the federal government as part of the Trump Administration’s whole-of-America response.”
In addition to industry partners like Microsoft and Amazon, the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium consists of academic partners like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
There are also partners from the U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratories as well as federal agencies like the National Science Foundation and NASA.
In order to benefit from these advanced computing resources, researchers need to submit COVID-19 related research proposals to the consortium via the website.
The consortium will then assess the public health benefits of the proposal with the help of scientists and computing researchers and match up these proposals with the computing resources at hand.
The consortium is highly likely to review and finalize research proposals around the topics of bioinformatics, epidemiology, and molecular modeling to better understand the coronavirus threat and how to prevent the virus from spreading.
Microsoft’s AI for Health expanding access to Azure tools
Through its AI for Health program, Microsoft will provide researchers with access to some of its computing resources like Azure cloud and more. Commenting on this initiative, Microsoft’s AI for Health lead John Kahan wrote:
“We want to make sure researchers working to combat COVID-19 have access to the tools they need.”
Similarly, Google and Amazon will provide users with their cloud offerings in the fight against COVID-19.
Recently, Facebook announced a couple of new initiatives aiming to help government health organizations in their response to the global pandemic using Messenger.
