White House Partners With IBM To Create Supercomputer Power To Combat COVID-19

IBM IBM, Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, Alphabet's Google and Microsoft MSFT teamed up with White House to provide research assistance for combating the coronavirus.

What Happened

On Sunday evening, President Donald Trump announced that the federal government in alliance with IBM is setting up the world's most powerful supercomputer to fight the coronavirus epidemic, CNBC reports.

IBM, along with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Department of Energy, formed the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium will also connect researchers with top computational scientists to ensure the machines are used as efficiently and effectively as possible.

The High Performance Computing would assist researchers with developing predictive models to analyze the progress of the disease and also build a model for new potential therapies or a possible vaccine.

Other Supporting Companies

The President added that other companies, which include Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, and a number of academic institutions, will also contribute a lot of different things to the consortium. IBM stated that it is working with a number of national labs and other institutions to offer 16 systems with a total of 330 petaflops for computing various projects in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling, TechCrunch reported.

Results

The Director of IBM Research Dario Gil said in an interview with CNN Business that researchers have used the supercomputer to scan 8,000 compounds and managed to categorize 77 of them.

The most relevant ones could be used to prevent the spike protein in coronavirus and make it powerless to cling on to the host cells in the human body.

These 77 small-molecule drug compounds can be experimented further, instead of all 8,000, to develop a possible COVID-19 treatment.