The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) launched the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium – a partnership with Federal agencies, industry, and academia – to provide supercomputing resources to COVID-19 coronavirus researchers on March 22.
“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,” U.S. CTO Michael Kratsios said.
Led by OSTP, IBM, the Department of Energy (DOE), and the National Science Foundation (NSF), the project aims to “significantly advance the pace of scientific discovery in the fight to stop the virus.”
Researchers can submit research proposals related to COVID-19 that will be reviewed for the public health benefit and matched with computing resources at a participating institution. While the consortium currently offers 16 computing systems, additional tech such as cloud computing will be added over time.
“By providing researchers access to world leading technology here in our own backyard, we take an additional leap towards ending this pandemic. We look forward to collaborating with scientists and researchers to bring an end to COVID-19,” DOE Under Secretary for Science Paul Dabbar said.
Other partners in the consortium include Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and several DOE National Laboratories.
