A consortium of tech companies, government bodies and universities is making 330 petaflops of supercomputer capacity available to researchers studying the coronavirus.

IBM Corp., a member of the group, unveiled the initiative on Sunday. Researchers can request computing resources via an online applications portal. 

The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium is launching with support from the White House and the U.S. Energy Department. Five of the department’s research centers are taking part including Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which houses the fastest supercomputer in the world. They are joined by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, operator of the 24th fastest supercomputer in the world.

The private sector is well-represented in the consortium too. Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC are all backing the initiative alongside IBM. 

The 330 petaflops of processing power the group is putting at researchers’ disposal comes from 16 different supercomputers. A single petaflop equals a quadrillion, or a million billion, calculations per second. For further context, that’s nearly one and a half times the processing power of Oak Ridge’s IBM-built Summit system (pictured), which has held the No. 1 spot on the TOP500 list of fastest supercomputers since 2018.

Summit has “already enabled researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee to screen 8,000 compounds to find those that are most likely to bind to the main ‘spike’ protein of the coronavirus, rendering it unable to infect host cells,” IBM Research director Dario Gil wrote in a blog post. That project, which was detailed earlier this month, uncovered 77 small-molecule compounds with the potential to be useful in future coronavirus treatments.

One especially notable detail about the new initiative is the speed at which it formed. According to Gil, the group was born from a discussion that IBM held with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy just a few days prior. It’s a reflection of the rapidity with which the tech sector’s largest players have mobilized to take up the fight against the virus.

Case in point: The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium isn’t the first initiative of its kind. AWS last week launched a $20 million program to provide free cloud infrastructure and technical support to scientists developing faster coronavirus testing methods.

The tech industry is also supporting researchers’ work in other ways. Microsoft Corp. this month helped develop a massive open-source dataset of scientific articles about COVID-19 disease and the coronavirus virus family. Nvidia Corp. is offering researchers free 90-day access to its Parabricks software toolkit for genomic analysis. Other, smaller firms have joined the fray as well by opening up access to their technology for scientists working on ways of combating the virus.

Photo: Oak Ridge National Laboratory