Big Companies Partner With White House To Help In Research

In the press conference, President Trump announced the launch of a new public/private consortium to “unleash the power of American super-computing resources.”

The members of this consortium are the White House, the Department of Energy and IBM. Other companies, including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, as well as several academic institutions, are also “contributing lots of different things,” Trump said.

IBM is working with several national labs and other institutions to offer a total of 330 petaflops of computing to various projects in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling.

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are also part of the consortium that is being led by IBM, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the Department of Energy.

IBM and its partners will coordinate the efforts to evaluate proposals and provide access to high-performance computing resources to those that are most likely to have an immediate impact.

“How can supercomputers help us fight this virus? These high-performance computing systems allow researchers to run very large numbers of calculations in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling. These experiments would take years to complete if worked by hand, or months if handled on slower, traditional computing platforms,” writes Dario Gil, IBM’s Director of Research.

AWS has already dedicated $20 million to support COVID-19 research while Microsoft has already announced several different initiatives. Google has now launched its coronavirus website (though it’s very different from the one Trump once promised) and Alphabet’s Verily is helping Bay Area residents find testing sites if needed.