IBM partners with White House to direct supercomputing power for coronavirus research

guest · Mar 22, 2020

IBM partners with White House to direct supercomputing power for coronavirus research
March 22, 2020
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03...upercomputing-power-for-coronavirus-research/

IBM on Sunday announced an initiative to increase access to high-performance computing for groups researching and fighting the novel coronavirus, also known as COVID-19.

IBM partnered with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Department of Energy to create the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. The effort, which IBM started just last week, is expected to harness powerful high-performance computing, or “supercomputing,” resources that will massively increase the speed and capacity of coronavirus-related research.

“How can we find new treatments? Or ultimately vaccines and a cure?” Director of IBM Research Dario Gil asked in an interview with CNN Business. “Those are the areas we’ll be looking at … We’re going to bring an unprecedented amount of computing power” to address coronavirus.
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The system will harness 16 supercomputing systems from IBM, national laboratories, several universities, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others. Computing power will be provided via remote access to researchers whose projects are approved by the consortium’s leadership board, which will be comprised of tech industry leaders and White House and Energy Department officials.

The consortium, Gil said, will manage priorities for the system and ensure as much supercomputing power is allocated to coronavirus research as possible.
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IBM: IBM helps bring supercomputers into the global fight against COVID-19

guest · Mar 31, 2020

D-Wave Systems offers free quantum cloud access to beat COVID-19
March 31, 2020
https://www.slashgear.com/d-wave-systems-offers-free-quantum-cloud-access-to-beat-covid-19-31614938/

In a recent press release, D-Wave Systems Inc. is now offering free access to its Leap quantum cloud service to beat the COVID-19 pandemic. D-Wave is considered a leader in quantum computing software, systems, and services.

It’s also the world’s first supplier of quantum computers. Working closely with partners and customers including Volkswagen, KYOCERA, Denso, Menten AI, and the Jülich Supercomputing Center, the various global engineering and medical teams can access the Leap quantum cloud service to fast-track the development of testing kits, vaccines, and a possible cure to treat COVID-19.
How can quantum computers help to defeat COVID-19?
Since quantum computers are faster and can process complex amounts of data at once, the application is best-suited for analyzing new methods of diagnosis to curb the spread of COVID-19.
Additionally, quantum computing helps in modeling the spread of the virus (which can lead to possible cures and vaccines), optimizing supply distribution, and even hospital logistics.

“It is promising to accelerate the solution of complex problems in pharmacology and epidemiology, such as those that have arisen in the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis, by means of hybrid workflows from quantum-classical computer simulations,” added Prof. Dr. Kristel Michielsen of the Jülich Supercomputing Center.
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D-Wave: D-Wave Provides Free Quantum Cloud Access for Global Response to COVID-19

guest · Apr 6, 2020

Got an idea for dealing with COVID-19? A Taiwanese supercomputer could help
The National Center for High-Performance Computing will make its supercomputer available to researchers for six months
April 6, 2020
https://www.zdnet.com/article/got-a...ere-may-be-a-free-ai-supercomputer-in-taiwan/

Projects that combat against the COVID-19 pandemic can now apply to have Taiwan's AI cloud computing platform, Taiwan Computing Cloud (TWCC), be a part of their efforts.

Owned by the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC), TWCC is built on top of Taiwania 2.
Taiwania 2 delivers nine petaflops of performance and was ranked 21st on the top 500 list of supercomputers in November 2019.

Taiwan Minister of Science and Technology, Chen Liang-Gee, said in a statement to the media that technology investment would play an important role in the global battle against the virus.
On the industry front, tech firms like IBM and Alibaba have already offered up their supercomputing power [...] D-Wave has also announced that its quantum computer [...]
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guest · Apr 6, 2020

Nvidia joins supercomputing consortium to help fight Covid-19
Fighting Covid-19 with sheer processing power
April 6, 2020
https://www.techspot.com/news/84713-nvidia-joins-supercomputing-consortium-help-fight-covid-19.html

The big picture: Tech companies, academics and government agencies from around the world are increasingly making their supercomputing resources available to researchers working on treatments for Covid-19. The hope is that by using a wealth of processing power, researchers can expedite the discovery of drugs to combat the virus.

Nvidia on Monday announced it has joined the Covid-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, a collective of industry, academia and federal agencies accelerating methods to detect, contain and treat the latest coronavirus.
Nvidia said its task force of computer scientists joining the fight have expertise across a range of disciplines including drug discover, molecular dynamics, genomics, medical imaging, AI, supercomputing and data analysis.

Specifically, the GPU maker will lend a hand by applying its AI to help the consortium process data faster and optimize the group’s supercomputers for higher throughput.
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Nvidia: NVIDIA Brings GPU, HPC and AI Expertise to COVID-19 Battle

A task force of NVIDIA computer scientists has joined the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, which brings together leaders from the U.S. government, industry and academia to accelerate research using the world’s most powerful HPC resources.
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guest · Apr 8, 2020

White House Expands Coronavirus-Focused Supercomputing Consortium
April 7, 2020
https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-te...rus-focused-supercomputing-consortium/164429/

The White House accepted three new members into the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium this week—less than a month after producing the new partnership to accelerate research around the novel coronavirus and ultimately help halt it.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Wyoming Supercomputing Center, chipmaker AMD and graphics processing units-maker NVIDIA join a variety of other national labs, agencies, companies and academic institutions [...]
U.S. Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios announced the new members’ inclusion via tweet Monday, and in it, also added that the consortium “has already matched 15 research proposals with compute power and resources on some of the world’s most powerful machines,” since its launch on March 22.

At this point, the consortium provides access to 30 supercomputers with more than 400 petaflops of compute performance.
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NVIDIA released its own announcement Monday regarding the expertise its newly established “task force of computer scientists” [...]
“More than 41,000 NVIDIA GPUs deliver about 75% of the combined capability of the 30 consortium supercomputers,” Hamilton noted.

On a call with reporters following the consortium’s initial launch in late March, Energy’s Undersecretary for Science Paul Dabbar explained how the new strategic partnership works. To start, researchers anywhere can submit relevant coronavirus-related research proposals to an online portal created and run by the consortium.
[...] It’s early to tell, but those assets appear to be paving the way for some results. Since its launch several weeks ago, as Kratsios briefly mentioned, 15 research proposals have been matched with partners to date.
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guest · Apr 18, 2020

AMD donates US$15M in HPC systems to fight coronavirus
April 17, 2020
https://www.crn.com.au/news/amd-donates-us15m-in-hpc-systems-to-fight-coronavirus-546836

AMD is donating US$15 million worth of high-performance computing systems to accelerate research of the novel coronavirus as the chipmaker moves to protect its employees and support various relief efforts.

Lisa Su, AMD's CEO, said in a message Wednesday that the donation is part of the company's new COVID-19 HPC fund that is meant to help research the virus and other diseases. This is on top of the company's new membership in The White House-led COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium [...]

"The fund will include an initial donation of US$15 million of high-performance systems powered by AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs to key research institutions," Su said. "To ease the implementation and speed the useful impact from these donations, we are working with our HPC system provider partners to provide ready-to-install HPC nodes."
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AMD: Shared Resilience: Update to AMD COVID-19 Response

Providing AMD Technology to Support Medical Research
AMD is announcing today a COVID-19 HPC fund to provide research institutions with computing resources to accelerate medical research on COVID-19 and other diseases. [...]
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guest · Apr 19, 2020

Supercomputing consortium ponders how to size up and publicize coronavirus projects
April 17, 2020
https://www.fedscoop.com/supercomputing-consortium-coronavirus-research/

The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium is developing processes for measuring progress and publicizing results of its research projects, which have only just begun.

Convened by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to speed the work of coronavirus researchers, the growing group of government, industry and academia members discussed information gathering on a board call Monday.
The consortium hasn’t quantified the progress of the 15 research proposals to which it has started supplying more than 402 petaflops of compute power. But plans are in the works to review researchers’ accomplishments on a weekly basis.

“If we find something interesting, for example, on the genome analysis or on the repositioning of existing drugs, a measurement of success is that hopefully we … publish or make public, one way or the other, the results of that,” Paul Dabbar, undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy, told FedScoop.
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guest · May 8, 2020

Brazilian supercomputer to be used for coronavirus research
May 8, 2020
https://www.zdnet.com/article/brazilian-supercomputer-to-be-used-for-coronavirus-research/

Brazilian supercomputer Santos Dumont will be available to scientists and researchers who are working on projects related to Covid-19.

The National Laboratory of Scientific Computing (LNCC), where the supercomputer is based, is now analyzing requests from professionals who could benefit from the computing power of the cluster, which has a capacity of approximately 5.1 petaflops.
Under the initiative, researchers will have free access to NVIDIA Enterprise's Parabricks software to optimize research tasks, such as reducing the time spent to analyze an entire human genome from two days down to less than an hour.

According to the LNCC, which is based in the Rio de Janeiro city of Petrópolis, the supercomputer is already being used for three research projects related to the new coronavirus.
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guest · May 14, 2020

NVIDIA's newest AI supercomputer joins the fight against COVID-19
The GDX A100 offers 5 petaflops of processing power
May 14, 2020
https://www.engadget.com/nvidia-gtc-2020-ai-health-covid-19-130031390.html

NVIDIA is bringing its AI expertise to bear in the fight against COVID-19, the company announced during its GTC 2020 keynote on Thursday. Specifically, the first of NVIDIA’s new line of AI-driven supercomputing systems, the DGX A100, will be sent to Argonne National Lab where it will help government researchers screen potential coronavirus therapeutics far faster than they could do by hand.

“We’re using America’s most powerful supercomputers in the fight against COVID-19, running AI models and simulations on the latest technology available, like the NVIDIA DGX A100,” Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences at Argonne, said in that statement.
“The compute power of the new DGX A100 systems coming to Argonne will help researchers explore treatments and vaccines and study the spread of the virus, enabling scientists to do years’ worth of AI-accelerated work in months or days.”
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Once the A100 is installed in Argonne, researchers there will “be able to screen 1 billion drugs in under 24 hours,” Kimberly Powell, Vice President of Healthcare at NVIDIA, told reporters in a briefing. Without the added computing power, researchers would need close to a year to screen the same number of therapeutics.

“This supercomputer is going to combine both accelerated computing and artificial intelligence,” Powell continued.
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guest · May 14, 2020

Wafer-Scale Engine AI Supercomputer Is Fighting COVID-19
May 13, 2020
https://www.hpcwire.com/2020/05/13/cerebras-argonne-supercomputer-fighting-covid-19/

Seemingly every supercomputer in the world is allied in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic – but not many of them are fresh out of the box. Cerebras Systems has announced that its brand new CS-1 AI supercomputer, which was deployed for the first time less than six months ago at Argonne National Laboratory, is now working to identify therapeutics for COVID-19.

For Cerebras, a team of AI-focused engineers, the Argonne deployment was a landmark. The CS-1, they claimed, was the fastest AI supercomputer in existence, including the first deployment of Cerebras’ “Wafer Scale Engine” (WSE) – itself the largest chip ever built, with 1.2 trillion transistors and nearly 72 square inches of silicon.

“In the war against COVID-19 and other novel viruses,” Cerebras stated, “the power of AI supercomputers promises to build more robust workflows, accelerate research and development of deep learning models and greatly advance the future of disease research.”
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Argonne National Lab: Argonne National Laboratory and Cerebras Systems Leverage the World’s Fastest AI Supercomputer to Advance COVID-19 Research

guest · May 24, 2020

‘We are doing in a few months what would normally take a drug development process years to do’: DoE’s Argonne Labs battles COVID-19 with AI
The Department of Energy’s super-computing facilities are dramatically speeding up the search for a cure for COVID-19
May 24, 2020
https://www.zdnet.com/article/we-ar...o-does-argonne-labs-battles-covid-19-with-ai/

Something like a pandemic can speed up scientific research.
Case in point, neural networks are turning up new kinds of signals in the COVID-19 disease that may change how scientists look for cures.

Argonne National Laboratories, one of nine giant supercomputing centers of the U.S. Department of Energy, has for several months now been employing massive computing power, including novel machines from the Silicon Valley startup Cerebras Systems, to model how existing drugs "dock" with proteins of the virus, meaning, how well a drug attaches to the functional part of a virus.

"We are doing in a few months what would normally take a drug development process years to do," said Stevens.
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Even with a smaller universe to search, Argonne must make use of massive computing power. To combine the descriptors and fingerprints with the images, Argonne has been making use of a novel computer from Cerebras, based in Los Altos in Silicon Valley.
The key, said Stevens, is that a CS-1 can "iterate" on combinations of many neural networks without the trouble of tying together numerous CPUs or GPUs.

"[The] Cerebras [machine] is very fast, and in the kind of iterative design workflow that we're doing, we need to test lots of ideas," he told ZDNet.

"They're running 30, 50 days on machines that cost a quarter of a billion dollars to do the work that we're doing in a single machine that's the size of a dorm fridge," said Feldman. "And that's enormously exciting."
In addition to the Cerebras system, Argonne will also be doing COVID-19 work on the new "A100" chips from Nvidia, announced a week ago.
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guest · May 29, 2020

How the world's largest and fastest supercomputers are being used to understand the coronavirus
The UK will be the first country outside the US to join the COVID-19 High Performance Computing consortium
May 28, 2020
https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-t...are-being-used-to-understand-the-coronavirus/

UK scientists working to tackle the coronavirus pandemic will be granted access to some of the largest and fastest supercomputers in the world to help speed up their understanding of COVID-19.

Through the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing (HPC) consortium, researchers will work with other G7 nations battling the outbreak by sharing research and knowledge of coronavirus, and identifying potential solutions.
The US-led consortium brings together 40 members across government, industry and academia and counts Google, NASA, the US Department of Energy and IBM among its members.

"By joining this consortium, our leading researchers will be able to access some of the most advanced computers in the world to speed up their research, gain access to new developments, and share the UK's world-class computing technologies to find a solution to this virus," said Solloway.
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The HPC consortium has already supported 59 research projects that use high performance computing platforms to gain insights from the disease and those similar to it, such as SARs.
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UK joins COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium

The UK has added more than 20 Petaflops of high-performance computing capability to the global effort to address the coronavirus crisis by joining the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. For perspective, a supercomputer with just eight petaflops can do a million calculations per person in the world per second. Together, the Consortium offers 50 times that.
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guest · Jun 2, 2020

AMD, Penguin Computing Supply HPC Systems For COVID-19 Research
June 1, 2020
https://www.crn.com/news/components...ting-supply-hpc-systems-for-covid-19-research

AMD and Penguin Computing have reached new deals to supply supercomputers to three U.S. universities while also setting up a new cloud-based system for COVID-19 research.

Penguin Computing said Monday it will supply high-performance computing systems equipped with AMD's second-generation EPYC processors and Radeon Instinct MI50 GPUs to New York University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rice University in Houston, Texas. AMD is also contributing a system for its cloud HPC service, Penguin Computing On Demand.
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With each university system capable of performing more than one petaflop and Penguin Computing's new cloud system capable of four petaflops, these are the first systems to be funded by AMD's $15 million COVID-19 HPC fund, which kicked off in April with a deal to supply hundreds of Radeon Instinct MI50 GPUs for the U.S. Department of Energy's Corona supercomputer.
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AMD: AMD COVID-19 HPC Fund to Deliver Supercomputing Clusters to Researchers Combatting COVID-19

Donation of systems to NYU, MIT, and Rice University brings over seven petaflops of compute power to fight global pandemic

High performance AMD CPUs and GPUs to power focused research programs at leading institutions

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guest · Jun 8, 2020

How scientists are using supercomputers to combat COVID-19
June 8, 2020
https://venturebeat.com/2020/06/08/...elping-scientists-better-understand-covid-19/

Alongside the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), IBM announced in March that it would help coordinate an effort to provide hundreds of petaflops of compute to scientists researching the coronavirus. As part of the newly launched COVID-19 High Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium, IBM pledged to assist in evaluating proposals and to provide access to resources for projects that “make the most immediate impact.”

Much work remains, but some of the Consortium’s most prominent members — among them Microsoft, Intel, and Nvidia — claim that progress is being made.
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Petaflops of compute
Powerful computers allow researchers to undertake high volumes of calculations in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling, many of which would take months on traditional computing platforms (or years if done by hand).
Moreover, because the computers are available in the cloud, they enable teams to collaborate from anywhere in the world.

“Technology is a critical part of the COVID-19 research going on right now all over the world,” Dell Technologies VP Thierry Pellegrino told VentureBeat.

Companies and institutions matched 62 projects in the U.S., Germany, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Croatia, Spain, the U.K., and other countries with supercomputers [...]
These are running on over 136,000 nodes containing 5 million processor cores and more than 50,000 graphics cards, which together deliver over 483 petaflops (430 trillion floating-point operations per second) of compute across hardware maintained by the Consortium’s 40 partners. [...]
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“The COVID-19 HPC Consortium … is the largest public-private computing partnership ever created. What started as a series of phone calls […] five days later, more than two dozen partners came on board, many who are typically rivals,” said IBM’s Turek.
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guest · Jun 23, 2020

Japanese supercomputer, crowned world's fastest, is fighting coronavirus
June 23, 2020
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-53147684

Japan's Fugaku supercomputer claimed the top spot on Monday, carrying out 2.8 times more calculations per second than an IBM machine in the US.

Fugaku has already been put to work on fighting the coronavirus, simulating how droplets would spread in office spaces with partitions installed or in packed trains with the windows open.
When it is fully operational next year, experts are hoping the machine will also be able to help narrow down the search for effective treatments for the virus.
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Its performance was measured at 415.53 petaflops, 2.8 times faster than second-place Summit's 148.6 petaflops.

"I hope that the leading-edge IT developed for it will contribute to major advances on difficult social challenges such as Covid-19," said Satoshi Matsuoka, the head of Riken's Center for Computational Science.
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guest · Oct 5, 2020

Nvidia building UK supercomputer to boost COVID-19 research
October 5, 2020
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...uter-to-boost-covid-19-research-idUSKBN26Q1Y5

U.S. chip giant Nvidia said on Monday it is building Britain’s most powerful supercomputer, which will use artificial intelligence to help researchers solve pressing medical challenges, including those related to COVID-19.

GSK and AstraZeneca, which are both involved in coronavirus vaccine research, will be two of the first pharmaceutical companies to harness the power of the machine, Nvidia said.
The Cambridge-1 computer, which is expected to come online by the end of the year in Cambridge, east England, will be a NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD system capable of delivering more than 400 petaflops of AI performance, the company said.

“The Cambridge-1 supercomputer will serve as a hub of innovation for the UK, and further the groundbreaking work being done by the nation’s researchers in critical healthcare and drug discovery,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, in his GPU Technology Conference keynote speech.
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Nvidia: NVIDIA Building UK’s Most Powerful Supercomputer, Dedicated to AI Research in Healthcare

NVIDIA today announced that it is building the United Kingdom’s most powerful supercomputer, which it will make available to U.K. healthcare researchers using AI to solve pressing medical challenges, including those presented by COVID-19.
Cambridge-1 will be the first NVIDIA supercomputer designed and built for external research access.
NVIDIA Clara for Computational Drug Discovery
NVIDIA will help researchers take advantage of NVIDIA Clara Discovery™, a state-of-the-art suite of tools optimized for NVIDIA DGX™ that brings together the power of imaging, radiology and genomics to develop AI applications for the biggest computational tasks of healthcare.
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guest · Oct 13, 2020

mood said: ↑

Japanese supercomputer, crowned world's fastest, is fighting coronavirus
June 23, 2020
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-53147684
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Fujitsu's Fugaku supercomputer helping fight COVID-19 in Japan
October 13, 2020
https://www.zdnet.com/article/fujitsus-fugaku-supercomputer-helping-fight-covid-19-in-japan/

Japanese scientific research institute RIKEN is home to the world's top supercomputer, with Fugaku being jointly developed with Fujitsu.

Fugaku is expected to be in full operation soon, but it is being used already by researchers in Japan for various matters, one of which is the country's fight against COVID-19.

"But one very important area there is how we fight against COVID-19 and we have quickly stood up this program, COVID-19 program, even as Fugaku was being built, and, in fact, we did this in less than one month."
Speaking as part of Fujitsu's digital ActivateNow conference on Tuesday night, Matsuoka said the program has been receiving "stellar results", mostly due to the computing resources available to scientists matching the entire high-performance compute capacity in Japan.
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guest · Nov 17, 2020

Supercomputing project shifts focus to immediate outcomes for coronavirus patients
November 16, 2020
https://www.fedscoop.com/covid-hpc-consortium-phase-2/

The nationwide public-private effort to supply COVID-19 researchers with supercomputing power is preparing for its second phase, which will prioritize research projects with immediate health benefits for coronavirus patients.

IBM will spearhead the six-month Phase 2 of the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, which will leverage the greater volume of anonymized patient data now available to better understand treatment outcomes.
The goal — as it was in March when the consortium launched — is to leverage “what we can do together,” Jamie Thomas, general manager of systems strategy and development at IBM Strategy, told FedScoop.
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Phase 1 of the supercomputing project focused on tracking the spread of the virus and processing data for vaccine development.
Phase 2 will use large clinical datasets to model patient response to the virus; validate vaccine response models from multiple clinical trials; evaluate combination therapies that use repurposed molecules; and create epidemiological models, the consortium said.

“I think at the end of six months we’ll do what we’re doing right now,” Thomas said. We’ll evaluate what we’ve achieved, what we’ve learned and that will then inform us as to what we might do next.”
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IBM: COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium Enters New Phase Focused on Helping Researchers to Identify Potential Therapies for Patients

Second phase of operation will prioritize research projects with potential to help patients within the next six months
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IBM partners with White House to direct supercomputing power for coronavirus research

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