Webinar:  COVID 19 High Performance Computing Consortium 

The Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable (GUIRR) of the National Academies of Science and Engineering will hold a webinar on the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. The Consortium was established in March by U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the White House, in partnership with industry and academic leadership, to provide COVID-19 researchers with access to the world’s most powerful high-performance computing resources. These resources allow researchers to run very large numbers of calculations in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling to advance the pace of scientific discovery to accelerate treatments and ultimately a cure.

The HPC Consortium currently includes 38 compute capacity donating members (11 companies, 11 universities, seven DOE National Labs, NASA, the National Science Foundation, and seven NSF-sponsored supercomputing centers), and six affiliates contributing donated software, services, and expertise. As of May 15, 2020, there were 51 active COVID-19 research projects, representing 47 institutions and seven nations over a broad range of fields including the basic science involving the virus, therapeutic development, and patients. There are over 21 projects with experimental, clinical, or policy transition plans.

The webinar will feature Dr. Dario Gil, Director of IBM Research and co-chair of the Consortium, member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and nominee to the National Science Board; and Michael Rosenfield, Vice President for Data Centric Solutions at IBM Research, who has played a leadership role in the creation and operation of the Consortium, to discuss the formation of the Consortium and the way it matches researchers to supercomputing capabilities.

Related Reading:

Inside the Global Race to Fight COVID-19 Using the World’s Fastest Supercomputers” Scientific American, Apr 6, 2020

Let’s Create an Elite Scientific Body to Advise on Global Catastrophes,” Scientific American, Apr 30, 2020

COVID 19 High Performance Computing Consortium | National Academies