NVIDIA joins the digital coronavirus fight

NVIDIA has announced it will join the digital fight against coronavirus by providing the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium its expertise in AI, biology and large-scale computing optimizations. NVIDIA will also provide the consortium with access to its SaturnV supercomputer.

The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium is a private-public effort led by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the U.S. Department of Energy and IBM. By bringing together federal government, industry and academic leaders, consortium members can provide unfettered access to many of the world’s most powerful high-performance computing resources to support COVID-19 research.

This isn’t the first time NVIDIA has stepped up to the plate to support the fight against coronavirus. With more than 27,000 Tesla V100 GPUs inside the Summit supercomputer, NVIDIA has been diligently working toward uncovering the virus’ largest spike protein. This protein is what allows the coronavirus to invade human cells and infect individuals.

NVIDIA has also outsourced efforts related to Folding@home, encouraging PC gamers to donate unused GPU clock cycles to increase the computing power put toward the digital fight against COVID-19. Since kicking off in February 2020, 400,000 volunteers have joined NVIDIA in its Folding@home initiative.

Further, NVIDIA has also made access to its GPU-accelerated genome analysis toolkit Parabricks free for 90 days to any researcher currently working to combat the virus. 

With an array of businesses, organizations and government leaders working in tandem to combat the coronavirus, one can only hope that we’ll soon bid farewell to COVID-19.