High-powered computer-industry players, government entities and universities are teaming up to further technology that can be used in the fight against the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium includes IBM, AWS, Google, HPE, and Microsoft as well as US National Labs, NASA, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, U.S. Department of Energy and others.

The idea is to meld the high-performance computing systems supported by consortium members to let researchers run massive amounts of epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling calculations. These experiments would take years to complete if worked by hand, or months if handled on slower, traditional computing platforms, according to IBM.

By pooling their supercomputing capacity the consortium can offer extraordinary supercomputing power to scientists, medical researchers and government agencies as they respond to and mitigate the coronavirus spread, wrote Dario Gil, Director of IBM Research in a blog.

“As a powerful example of the potential, IBM’s Summit, the most powerful supercomputer on the planet, 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,” Gil wrote.  “They were able to recommend the 77 promising small-molecule drug compounds that could now be experimentally tested. This is the power of accelerating discovery through computation.”

Researchers will be able to submit COVID-19-related research proposals to the consortium via this online portal, which will then be reviewed for matching with computing resources from one of the partner institutions. An expert panel comprised of top scientists and computing researchers will work with proposers to assess the public health benefit of the work, with emphasis on projects that can ensure rapid results.

The tech world has responded to the novel coronavirus in other ways recently, for example:

This story, "Tech giants, government agencies pledge supercomputing to fight COVID-19" was originally published by Network World.