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Global supercomputing power for coronavirus (COVID-19) research May 2020
COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium
The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium is a unique private-public effort spearheaded by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the U.S. Department of Energy and IBM. Consortium partners include Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as well as Oak Ridge National Laboratory, home to Summit, the world's most powerful supercomputer.
Fighting COVID-19 will require extensive research in areas like bioinformatics, epidemiology, and molecular modeling to understand the threat, work that demands a massive amount of computational capacity. The consortium will aggregate computing capabilities from the world's most powerful and advanced computers to help COVID-19 researchers fight the virus.
Folding@home
Folding@home is a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, notably the movements of proteins implicated in a variety of diseases. It brings together scientists who volunteer to run simulations of protein dynamics on their personal computers. Insights from this data is helping scientists to better understand biology, and providing new opportunities for developing therapeutics.
Folding@home is simulating the dynamics of COVID-19 proteins to hunt for new therapeutic opportunities. The project utilizes the spare CPU and GPU cycles of ordinary PC users around the world to collectively run computer simulations. As of 24th March, it was announced that Summit is now lending its power to the Folding@home COVID-19 project, making it the world’s fastest crowdsourced supercomputer and more powerful than the top seven supercomputers combined.
For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Fact and Figures page.