A consortium created to provide high-performance computing support for COVID-19 research and development has begun supplying over 402 petaflops of compute power for 15 research proposals, FedScoop reported Friday.
The COVID-19 HPC Consortium, established under the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in March, is planning to conduct weekly reviews of research proposals to mark milestones.
Paul Dabbar, undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy, said the consortium intends to make the results of successful research efforts accessible to the public.
DOE’s Exascale Computing Initiative is also working with the National Cancer Institute on initiatives such as genomics studies to accelerate COVID-19 research. DOE is lending its HPCs at various national laboratories to support the initiative.
“These tools can be useful in understanding how the microbiomes of the lungs and the digestive system can be affected by COVID-19 and to also analyze environmental samples,” noted Barbara Helland, associate director of DOE’s Office of Science.
NASA also submitted a research proposal to the consortium focused on using HPCs to analyze patients’ genome sequences to quantify coronavirus infection risks.
