Tech Companies Combine Forces To Fight COVID1
WASHINGTON: The White House has announced an unprecedented collaboration between US tech giants as they merge forces to fight the coronavirus. The task force is an indication of what can be achieved when these rival companies call a truce and combine to fight an enemy that is threatening the survival of the US and other nations.
IBM, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and NASA are all contributing, according to the Trump Administration, as it announced that IBM would be harvesting the power of its Summit supercomputer.
Many governments around the world see the fight against Covid19 as akin to war – and the US is no different. In IBM’s case, it has donated a total of 330 petaflops of computing power to various projects in epidemiology, bioinformatics and molecular modelling.
IBM plans to coordinate efforts to evaluate the proposals and provide access to high-performance computing resources to those that are most likely to have an immediate impact.
AWS has dedicated US$20 million to support Covid-19 research. Microsoft is developing initiatives around helping businesses cope with the fallout of this crisis and offering assistance through its AI for Health Program to develop research tools.
The software and services giant will also expand access to its Azure cloud by creating more opportunities for researchers to collaborate with the company’s data scientists.
Google has launched its coronavirus Web site and offered the resources of Google Cloud to help develop treatments and vaccines. NASA is also donating resources and urging its elite scientists and technicians to search for a solution.