IBM brings computing muscle in fight against outbreak

US tech heavyweight IBM is bringing its supercomputing prowess into the global fight against the COVID-19 outbreak.

Dario Gil, director of research at IBM, said in a post that since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, the company has been working closely with governments in the US and worldwide to find all available options to put technology and expertise to work to accelerate research and enable the scientific and medical community to develop treatments and ultimately a cure.

Now, in collaboration with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the US Department of Energy and many others, IBM said it is helping launch the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, which will bring forth an unprecedented amount of computing power—16 systems with more than 330 petaflops, 775,000 CPU cores, 34,000 GPUs, and counting — to help researchers everywhere better understand COVID-19, its treatments and potential cures.

According to Gil, these high-performance computing systems allow researchers to run very large numbers of calculations in epidemiology, bioinformatics and molecular modeling. These experiments would take years to complete if worked by hand, or months if handled on slower, traditional computing platforms.