Education
How and Why scientists use supercomputers to fight against COVID-19
IBM announced in March that it will help organize efforts to provide scientific researchers with hundreds of petaflop computing facilities. IBM is part of the White Haus Science and Technology Policy Office (OSTP).
IBM has committed itself to assist in evaluating proposals and provide access to capital for projects with the "most immediate effect" as part of the newly-established COVID-19 High Performance Comuting Consortium (HPC).
Much testing is still going on, but some of the leading consortiums, including Microsoft, Intel and Nvidia, say progress is being made.
Calculation Petaflops
Powerful computers enable researchers to conduct large volumes of epidemiology, bioinformatics and molecular modeling calculations, most of which would take months (or years if done by hand) on conventional computing platforms. In addition, because the machines are located in the cloud, teams can operate from anywhere in the world.
Experimental experience can help us understand key aspects of COVID-19, such as viral-human interaction, the viral structure and function, the small molecular architecture, drugs for repurpose, and patient pathway and outcomes.
Dell Technologies' VP, Thierry Pellegrino, said to the VentureBeat. "Technologie is a critical part of COVID-19 research that is currently under way around the world." "It is crucial for the world's population that researchers have the tools to understand, treat and combat the virus.
(Dell Technologies is a member of the Consortium). Scientists from around the world are real heroes, who do critical work in intense and unknown circumstances.
Companies and organizations have aligned 62 projects with Google Cloud, Amazon WebServices (AWS) and hundreds of free academic and non-profit institutions in the USA, India , South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Croatia, Spain and other countries.
They run on more than 136,000 node systems comprising 5 million processor cores and 50,000 graphics cards, which together produce over 483 petaflops of computers (430 trillion floating points per Second).
The Microsoft
Microsoft provides its Azure cloud computing platform supercomputing technology and provides researchers networks and storage services combined with Azure HPC workload orchestration.
The company's AI for Health initiative also involves data and observations and diagnosis, which in April allocated $20 million for advancement of five main areas
Nepali modeling and ventilator splitting
Microsoft's health AI supports the Nepal Applied Matematics and Research Institute (NAAMII) for non-profit research, using a simulation to simulate how the COVID-19 spreads to people in Nepal, based on various scenarios. The partnership funds the research institute. Such models will display trends that can save lives and livelihoods. Microsoft says.
Duke University uses Azure to investigate the splitting of fans, a technique enabling several patients to use the same fan. The Matlab division of MathWorks has partnered with Microsoft to automate study of researchers in distributed systems.
