With COVID-19 infection rates on the rise and vaccines still months from being publicly available, the COVID-19 High Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium—which includes multiple federal agencies in addition to industry and academia—is entering a “new phase” of its operation. READ MORE>>>
In March, IBM, the U.S. Department of Energy and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy launched an unprecedented initiative: the COVID-19 HPC Consortium. The wide-ranging consortium, aimed at leveraging worldwide supercomputing to fight the coronavirus, has since expanded to include 43 members (many international) and 600 petaflops of computing power (up from 330 in March), allocating those resources to more than 90 projects.
In the last eight months, however, much has changed beyond the size of the consortium: The physical structure of the virus (an emphasis for COVID-focused supercomputing in the spring and summer) is now much better understood; a viable vaccine now appears on track for scaled distribution by the spring of 2021; and after a year of dread, massive spikes in Europe and the U.S. signal that much of the world may indeed be staring down an extraordinarily dark winter.
With these factors in mind, the COVID-19 HPC Consortium has announced that its next phase will focus on benefiting patients over the next six months. Specifically, the consortium will support projects working on understanding and modeling patient response to the virus; learning and validating vaccine response models from multiple clinical trials; evaluating combination therapies using repurposed molecules; and designing epidemiological models.
