Trump moves to unleash US tech giants and universities in war against Coronavirus

A number of big technology firms, including Facebook and Microsoft, will be assisting the White House to combat coronavirus. The Office of Science and Technology Policy organized a consortium along with the U.S. Department of Energy and IBM to bring together federal government, industry, and academic leaders who are volunteering free compute time and resources on their world-class machines.

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Big fight against Coronavirus

Michael Kratsios, the White House’s chief technology officer said, "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. We thank the private sector and academic leaders who are joining the federal government as part of the Trump Administration’s whole-of-America response."

This partnership also includes two Universities - Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). MIT's Christopher Hill said, "Computing and AI have a major role to play in bringing Covid-19 under control. We want to do our part by making MIT’s two most powerful machines, Satori and TX-GAIA, available to researchers who are racing to understand the virus, model the outbreak, and accelerate drug discovery and design. This will be a team effort, and we hope our actions will inspire others to throw their computing power and brainpower at the virus.”

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The aim is to provide COVID-19 researchers worldwide with access to the world’s most powerful high-performance computing resources that can significantly advance the pace of scientific discovery in the fight to stop the virus.

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The following firms and institutions will be a part of this - IBM, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, MIT, Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, National Science Foundation, and NASA.

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