AMD and Nvidia Join Supercomputer-Powered Fight Against Coronavirus

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AMD and Nvidia have joined the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing (HPC) consortium -- an initiative started by the White House meant to make supercomputers accessible to researchers who are trying to combat the coronavirus.

The initiative kicked off two weeks ago, when the total power available tallied 330 PetaFLOPS. Now, with AMD and Nvidia as new members, the power figure has jumped up to 402 PetaFLOPS, spanned over 3.5-million CPU cores and 41,000 GPUs.

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 or fighting coronavirus with a Raspberry Pi.

Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

  • velocityg4
    How about adding Folding@Home to the list with 1.5 Exaflops? While not a true supercomputer. It is a supercomputer of sorts. Just specialized.

    Edit: I just saw the mention at the end. But it still deserves to be a part of the list. Given the significant resources it makes available.
    Reply
  • misanthropic-gamer
    velocityg4 said:
    How about adding Folding@Home to the list with 1.5 Exaflops? While not a true supercomputer. It is a supercomputer of sorts. Just specialized.

    Edit: I just saw the mention at the end. But it still deserves to be a part of the list. Given the significant resources it makes available.
    Um yeah, I have two rigs donating all idle time to Folding@Home and that cititation of 1.5 exaflops is accurate https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/foldinghome-passes-1-5-exaflops-in-compute-performance,8.html
    Reply
  • Unolocogringo
    Hey guys THANKS for folding and realizing what is possible.
    We do have a new team page , just click on the link in my sig and say hi.
    Reply