BP joins White House-led consortium, donating high-performance computing power and scientific expertise to accelerate research on global COVID-19 pandemic.
BP teams up with the US Government, universities and technology companies, donating its supercomputing capability to the public-private consortium formed in March 2020 by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, the U.S. Department of Energy and IBM.
The group is known as the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, and will use expertise and resources from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, BP and others.
Commenting this effort, David Eyton, BP’s executive vice president of Innovation & Engineering noted that
The world is rallying together in response to this pandemic and our biosciences experts, computer scientists and mathematicians are proud to play their part by supporting groundbreaking and potentially life-saving research.
Moreover, BP will provide access to its Center for High-Performance Computing (CHPC) in Houston, and make available its Biosciences Center, located in San Diego, California.
BP calls researchers to submit COVID-19 related research proposals to the Consortium online which will be reviewed and matched with computing resources from one of the partner institutions.
Among the proposals accepted by the consortium is one that will use artificial intelligence-driven biology to discover a treatment against COVID-19. A team, led by computational biologist Arvind Ramanathan of Argonne National Laboratory, aims to address the fundamental biological mechanisms of the virus and the disease and to identify potential therapeutics – with the help of machine learning and deep learning.