In a bid for Coronavirus vaccine, U.S ease access to Supercomputers

IBM announced that it will help coordinate an effort to provide over 330 petaflops of computing power to scientists researching COVID-19, which has sickened over 300,000 people. The company anticipates that the capacity will be used to develop algorithms that assess how COVID-19 is progressing and to model potential therapies in pursuit of a possible vaccine.

“We want to make sure researchers working to combat COVID-19 have access to the tools they need,” said Microsoft AI for Health program global head John Kahan.

“Through our AI for Health program, we’ve seen firsthand the impact of empowering talented researchers with powerful technology. We hope that by expanding access to the Azure cloud and high-performance computing capabilities, and by creating more opportunities to collaborate with our own data scientists, we can help accelerate this important work,” said Kahan.

Researchers will be able to apply through a website. They must describe whether support from staff at the national labs or other facilities will be essential, helpful, or unnecessary for their project, and whether any restrictions might apply, such as proprietary data sets or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) restrictions.

“America is coming together to fight COVID-19, and that means unleashing the full capacity of our world-class supercomputers to rapidly advance scientific research for treatments and a vaccine,” said U.S. Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios.

The White House previously partnered with Google parent company Verily to build a triaging tool to help symptomatic people find COVID-19 testing sites in the U.S.

Supercomputers have long been used to identify and test potential treatments for complex and chronic diseases. Researchers tapped the Texas Advanced Computing Center’s Lonestar5 cluster to simulate over 1,400 FDA-approved drugs to see if they could be used to treat cancer.

Supercomputers are used to tackle computational problems in initiatives such as drug discovery, material development and batter design.

The hope is that supercomputers can reduce the amount of time it takes to bring novel drugs to market. Fewer than 12% of all drugs entering clinical trials end up in pharmacies, and it takes at least 10 years for medicines to complete the journey from discovery to the marketplace.

U.S. President Trump gave Ford, GM, and Tesla the “go ahead” to make ventilators to help alleviate a shortage amid the pandemic, only days after Trump issued an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act.