Photo: NASA

The White House named NASA and the National Science Foundation as the federal agencies that will help lead its newly launched COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. The Consortium’s goal is to provide COVID-19 researchers worldwide with access to powerful high performance computing resources that can significantly advance the pace of scientific discovery in the fight to stop the virus.

The two agencies will join IBM, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which were selected as commercial industry representatives. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and various U.S. Department of Energy laboratories will also serve on the Consortium.

“America is coming together to fight COVID-19, and that means unleashing the full capacity of our world-class supercomputers to rapidly advance scientific research for treatments and a vaccine. We thank the private sector and academic leaders who are joining the federal government as part of the Trump Administration’s whole-of-America response,” U.S. Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios said in a statement.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine added, “We are pleased to lend NASA’s supercomputing expertise to assist in the global fight against this pandemic. For more than six decades the agency has used its expertise to take on challenges that have benefited people worldwide in unexpected ways.”