Microsoft fights coronavirus by joining White House-led consortium

The White House today announced the launch of the coronavirus (COVID-19) High Performance Computing Consortium that will offer medical researchers worldwide with access to the world’s most powerful high performance computing resources to advance the pace of scientific discovery to stop the virus. This consortium is headed by the White House, the U.S. Department of Energy and IBM. The consortium also includes others like Microsoft who have volunteered free compute time and resources for coronavirus (COVID-19) research.

“We want to make sure researchers working to combat coronavirus (COVID-19) have access to the tools they need. Through our AI for Health program we’ve seen first-hand 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 John Kahan, Microsoft Global Head, AI for Health Program.

Microsoft will offer grants to ensure additional access for researchers to Azure cloud and high-performance computing capabilities.

The following organizations have volunteered free compute time and resources on their machines:

Industry

• IBM
• Amazon Web Services
• Google Cloud
• Microsoft
• Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Academia

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratories

• Argonne National Laboratory
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• Los Alamos National Laboratory
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Sandia National Laboratories

Federal Agencies

• National Science Foundation
• NASA

If you are part of a research organization, you can apply for free compute resource here.

Source: Microsoft, Whitehouse