AMD, NVIDIA Join US Government’s COVID-19 HPC Consortium

There’s been much to come out of this COVID-19 pandemic that’s been upsetting, something that’s made pretty much all positive news seem that much more special. Today, AMD and NVIDIA both join the US government’s COVID-19 HPC Consortium, joining many others to dedicate massive amounts of computing power to researchers to help get necessary mysteries solved quick(er).

This HPC Consortium is a private-public effort that was spear-headed by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the U.S. Department of Energy along with IBM and many others. The ultimate goal is to collaborate on the highest level, and get this battle won.

The @WhiteHouse supercomputing partnership with U.S. tech companies, universities, @ENERGY, & @NSF continues to grow.

Today I am excited to announce @AMD @nvidia & @NWSCproject are joining the HPC COVID-19 Consortium.

Thank you for being part of this whole-of-America effort!

— Michael Kratsios (@USCTO) April 6, 2020

Other companies that AMD and NVIDIA join include Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and also Microsoft. Many universities and laboratories are in on the action, as well as a slew of federal agencies – including NASA.

On the official website, researchers are invited to submit their proposals via an online portal, and after review and acceptance, coordination will take place to get those who are trying to solve this medical emergency the proper access to compute power, and possibly stumble on the breakthrough we’re all waiting for.

If you’re a hardware geek, you may still want to check out the COVID-19 HPC Consortium link and scan to the bottom, where tech specs for all of the available hardware is made available. That includes the cloud instances that the likes of Amazon, HPE, Google, and Microsoft are offering up.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit supercomputer

It’s not too surprising to see this kind of effort take place, since we’ve known for a long while that supercomputers, and fast hardware in general, will help us solve medical mysteries faster than ever before. As we’ve heard about these capabilities over the years, though, very few of us would have expected we’d be seeing the importance of it play out in really real-time.

All of these companies deserve some praise for their donations of compute time here, and likewise, we owe a debt of gratitude to those researchers and doctors who are working overtime and under stressful situations to help the entire world defeat this enemy.