Nvidia joins the fight against COVID-19

Nvidia announced it is joining the fight to detect, contain, and treat COVID-19, which has already infected nearly 1.3 million and killed almost 71,000 people.

A task force made up of computer scientists at Nvidia has joined the White House and IBM-led COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, which as its name suggests, aims to accelerate research into the virus and the resulting pandemic.

The Nvidia task force, which is led by Ian Buck, VP and general manager of Accelerated Computing at Nvidia, aims to provide researchers with access to 30 supercomputers with more than 400 petaflops of compute performance.

“The COVID-19 HPC Consortium is the Apollo program of our time,” Buck said in a statement. “Not a race to the moon, this is a race for humanity. The rocket ships are GPU supercomputers, and their fuel is scientific knowledge. NVIDIA is going to help by making these rockets travel as fast as they can.”

The Nvidia task force will further lend its expertise in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), drug discovery, molecular dynamics, genomics, medical imaging, and data analytics. The company said it will also contribute the packaging of software for relevant AI and life sciences software applications through its GPU-accelerated software hub, Nvidia NGC.

In addition to joining the HPC Consortium, Nvidia also donated GPUs to Folding@home‘s efforts to find a cure for the virus. That project simulates protein folding and seeks to better understand how the virus behaves to potentially help researchers develop vaccines.

―SDX Central