Video: Why Supercomputers Are A Vital Tool In The Fight Against COVID-19

In this video from Forbes, Horst Simon from LBNL describes how supercomputers are being used for coronavirus research. “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.”

Jetstream and XSEDE resources available for pandemic research

As part of the worldwide effort to understand and contain the COVID-19 pandemic, Indiana University’s Jetstream, which offers cloud-based, on-demand computing and data analysis resources within the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), is fast-tracking projects that respond to the crisis. “Through the COVID-19 HPC Consortium, Jetstream will provide vital high-performance computing resources. Specifically, priority use of IU’s Jetstream cloud system for analysis of the virus and searches for cures and vaccines. Jetstream offers cloud-based, on-demand computing and data analysis resources, in support of research related to COVID-19.”

Interview: Under Secretary Paul Dabbar on the COVID-19 HPC Consortium

The DOE laboratory complex has many core capabilities that can be applied to addressing the threats posed by COVID-19. “This public-private partnership includes the biggest players in advanced computing from government, industry, and academia. At launch, the consortium includes five DOE laboratories, industry leaders like IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, and preeminent U.S. universities like MIT, RPI, and UC San Diego. And within a week, we’ve already received more than a dozen requests from other organizations to join the consortium.”