The U.S. is opening up access to its supercomputers to beat COVID-19.
The U.S. is making portions of over 30 supercomputers available to researchers worldwide to help identify therapies and vaccines related to the coronavirus. Supercomputers can process vast datasets and conduct complex simulations of molecules’ behavior much faster than other hardware, so the hope is this will help turbocharge efforts to combat the virus. The machines, which include Summit, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, are run by members of the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium announced on March 22, 2020 by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Members of the initial consortium include several U.S. Department of Energy national labs, including Lawrence Livermore, Sandia and Oak Ridge, which is the home of Summit. The consortium also includes MIT and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, as well as NASA and the National Science Foundation.
Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are also part of the initial consortium and are offering their cloud-based services to accelerate research work.
On April 6 the consortium announced several new members, including chipmakers AMD and NVIDIA, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Wyoming Supercomputing Center.
Researchers from academia, government and business can submit proposals to the consortium via a website. These are then reviewed by experts in high-performance computing, biology and other areas, who select the most promising ones. IBM, which has helped build a number of the supercomputers involved, is coordinating the consortium’s work.
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,” said Michael Kratsios, the U.S.’s chief technology officer, in a statement announcing the consortium’s creation.
Big number: over 402 petaflops. That’s the combined processing power of the supercomputers now available and it means they are collectively capable of performing 402 million billion calculations a second. Summit alone can deliver 200 petaflops. To match what it can do in the blink of an eye, every person on earth would have to perform a calculation every second of the day for somewhere around 305 days. The 30-plus machines boast a total of 3.5 million central processing unit cores and 41,000 graphics processing units to help power their work.
Background: There are already signs that supercomputers can be important tools in the battle against COVID-19. In a blog post about the new consortium, Dario Gil, the director of IBM Research, referred to work that teams from Oak Ridge and the University of Tennessee had already undertaken using Summit. They used it to screen 8,000 compounds and identified 77 promising ones that might be able to bind to the “spike” protein of the coronavirus, impeding its ability to infect host cells. On April 6 the consortium said it had already matched 15 research proposals with compute power available on the consortium’s machines.
Computing is stepping up to the fight in other ways too. Some researchers are crowdsourcing computing power to try to better understand the dynamics of the protein and a dataset of 29,000 research papers has been made available to researchers leveraging artificial intelligence and other approaches to help tackle the virus. IBM has launched a global coding challenge that includes a focus on COVID-19 and Amazon has said it will invest $20 million to help speed up coronavirus testing.