White House puts American supercomputers to work on Covid-19

[onetheycallEric]

Why it matters: In a bid to accelerate the understanding of the novel coronavirus and expedite research into potential drugs and vaccines, scientists and researchers will now have unprecedented access to some of the country's most powerful supercomputers.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping the globe, the White House has launched the Covid-19 HPC Consortium, allowing researchers access to US-based supercomputers. The Covid-19 HPC Consortium is a public-private consortium, headed up by the White House, the US Department of Energy, and IBM. Additionally, the initiative includes a smattering of other government organizations, technology companies, as well as academic institutes.

Google Cloud, Microsoft, AWS, and HPE are all partnering with the consortium to offer compute power. Furthermore, Department of Energy laboratories like Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, proud owners of the Summit and Sierra supercomputers respectively, have also joined.

The Department of Energy's laboratories are no strangers to supercomputing, but LLNL and ORNL are of particular relevance. LLNL is the same laboratory where the exascale El Capitan will live, and ORNL is set to deploy Frontier sometime next year. Both of these supercomputers will be among the world's first exascale machines.

IBM, along with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the U.S. Department of Energy, is helping to launch the #COVID19 High Performance Computing Consortium.

Learn more: https://t.co/KI0eiFwruJ pic.twitter.com/GNPEJOdUAa

— IBM (@IBM) March 22, 2020

The consortium is currently providing researchers access to 16 supercomputers, with a combined 330 petaFLOPS of compute across 775,000 CPU cores and 34,000 GPUs. In addition to the notable Summit, which scientists have already put to work on Covid-19, NASA and NSF are also allowing access to their supercomputer systems.

AWS is providing its EC2 C-type and EC2 P-type instances as well. Those instances are driven by Skylake-SP Xeons and Nvidia V100 Tensor GPUs, respectively. Other parties, like Google Cloud, haven't listed exactly what computing resources they are dedicating to the project.

Over the weekend, Folding@home reported over 400K users had signed up to fold, allowing Folding@home to reach over 470 petaFLOPS of distributed computing performance to untangle mysteries surrounding Covid-19 proteins.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/84513-white-house-puts-american-supercomputers-work-covid-19.html

 

[treetops]

They should also give the Fold@home project some free bandwidth? The servers can't seem to keep up with all the volunteers atm.

 

[hahahanoobs]

They should also give the Fold@home project some free bandwidth? The servers can't seem to keep up with all the volunteers atm.

Can you really say F@H should be any kind of priority right now after reading this? I mean, the collected information from folding is to help understanding diseases as a whole, and they probably don't have the manpower to analyze the data that pertains to COVID-19 before a task force with tools far above what our desktop PC's can. F@H is also an ongoing project not dedicated to COVID-19 research. Folding is important, but I don't think it's on anywhere near the same level as what these supercomputers and dedicated teams will do. Fold if you want to, but don't expect results anytime soon.

 

[yRaz]

Can you really say F@H should be any kind of priority right now after reading this? I mean, the collected information from folding is to help understanding diseases as a whole, and they probably don't have the manpower to analyze the data that pertains to COVID-19 before a task force with tools far above what our desktop PC's can. F@H is also an ongoing project not dedicated to COVID-19 research. Folding is important, but I don't think it's on anywhere near the same level as what these supercomputers and dedicated teams will do. Fold if you want to, but don't expect results anytime soon.

https://foldingathome.org/2020/03/1...e-doing-and-how-you-can-help-in-simple-terms/

Downloading Folding@home and helping us run simulations is the primary way to contribute. These calculations are enormous and every little bit helps! Each simulation you run is like buying a lottery ticket. The more tickets we buy, the better our chances of hitting the jackpot. Usually, your computer will never be idle, but we’ve had such an enthusiastic response to our COVID-19 work that you will see some intermittent downtime as we sprint to setup more simulations. Please be patient with us! There is a lot of valuable science to be done, and we’re getting it running as quickly as we can.[\quote]

 

[treetops]

"Over the weekend, Folding@home reported over 400K users had signed up to fold, allowing Folding@home to reach over 470 petaFLOPS"

"The consortium is currently providing researchers access to 16 supercomputers, with a combined 330 petaFLOPS of compute across 775,000 CPU cores and 34,000 GPUs. In addition to the notable Summit, which scientists have already put to work on Covid-19, NASA and NSF are also allowing access to their supercomputer systems. "

idk why you think they aren't working together, anyways, F@H is currently contributing more then the top 7 Super Computers in the world, no not always the Corona virus.

They have a influx of volunteers and simply need more download bandwidth. What a 10, 20 thousand dollar bandwidth boost from the government is such a bad idea? Linus Tech Tips is working with them to donate his badwidth to Fold@Home. They are in need. It's a voluntarily college funded program.

You don't have to take away resources to give them the servers they need.

Yes this is all good news....

 

[QuantumPhysics]

Better be careful. Those supercomputers could get a....virus.

 

[Uncle Al]

I'm curious to hear what IBM's Watson has to say about this mess. With an ability to read & digest 2 million pages of scientific papers every day it should be working on formulations of it's own .... or didn't they expand it for that as they said they were .....

 

[lipe123]

So what is the point exactly, there are already multiple vaccines in trials now as we speak.
It takes 1 year to bring a vaccine from first trial to ok for public use.

This is not going to speed that up at all.

 

[VariableSpike]

So what is the point exactly, there are already multiple vaccines in trials now as we speak.
It takes 1 year to bring a vaccine from first trial to ok for public use.

This is not going to speed that up at all.

It took 7 months for the H1N1 vaccine, and that was slightly less urgent in comparison

 

[lipe123]

It took 7 months for the H1N1 vaccine, and that was slightly less urgent in comparison

H1N1 is a flu strain, they were able to take the existing flu vaccine that already passed several trials and skip to the 3rd stage immediately.
This is a flu-like virus but its not the same and its not going to go any faster, I recently saw a good article on it but can't seem to find it under the piles of stuff out there now.

 

[Reasonable]

Thank you, President Trump. This website won't mention your name, so I did.

 

[Reasonable]

So what is the point exactly, there are already multiple vaccines in trials now as we speak.
It takes 1 year to bring a vaccine from first trial to ok for public use.

This is not going to speed that up at all.

A vaccine for this disease is not as important as having good treatments to save people. With genetic drift, the current vaccine candidates might not even work by next year.

 

[WillD]

Thank you, President Trump. This website won't mention your name, so I did.

Don't you mean - thank all the people who organised it and put the idea to Trump to sign? This is not something Trump would have come up with on his own, which is probably why the article doesn't mention his name. In all likelihood, all he did was sign a piece of paper.

 

[Danny101]

Better be careful. Those supercomputers could get a....virus.

Lol

 

[Danny101]

A vaccine for this disease is not as important as having good treatments to save people. With genetic drift, the current vaccine candidates might not even work by next year.

From what I've read this virus comes from a group of RDA strains which do have the tendency to mutate rapidly versus DNA strains, thereby limiting the effectiveness of vaccines. There is some good news in that the mutations have been slow with coronavirus when comparing the Chinese versions to those around the world. Possibly limited to just around 4 steppings, or 3 from the original.

 

[cliffordcooley]

Don't you mean - thank all the people who organised it and put the idea to Trump to sign? This is not something Trump would have come up with on his own, which is probably why the article doesn't mention his name. In all likelihood, all he did was sign a piece of paper.

In other words you are not thanking him for signing. Or else you wouldn't have commented.