AMD and Nvidia have joined the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing (opens in new tab) (HPC) consortium -- an initiative started by the White House meant to make supercomputers accessible to researchers who are trying to combat the coronavirus (opens in new tab).
The initiative kicked off two weeks ago, when the total power available tallied 330 PetaFLOPS (opens in new tab). Now, with AMD and Nvidia as new members, the power figure has jumped up to 402 PetaFLOPS, spanned over 3.5-million CPU cores (opens in new tab) and 41,000 GPUs (opens in new tab).
The following lists all the HPC consortium partners:
- IBM
- Amazon Web Services
- AMD
- Google Cloud
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise
- Microsoft
- Nvidia
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
- University of Illinois
- University of Texas at Austin
- University of California - San Diego
- Carnegie Mellon University
- University of Pittsburgh
- Indiana University
- University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Argonne National Laboratory
- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
- Los Alamos National Laboratory
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory
- National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
- Sandia National Laboratories
- XSEDE
- Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC)
- Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)
- San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC)
- National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
- Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute (IUPTI)
- Open Science Grid (OSG)
- National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
- NASA
Latest projects the consortium is working on includes exploring binding and fusion mechanisms of COVID-19 spike proteins with molecular dynamics simulations. This research is relevant as finding a molecule that is able to bind to the protein spikes is key to blocking the virus from being able to bind to human lung cells, thus preventing infection.
But supercomputers, corporations and universities aren't the only ones using technology to battle COVID-19. You can do it too by putting your own computer to work with Folding@Home (opens in new tab) or fighting coronavirus with a Raspberry Pi (opens in new tab).
