IBM commits world’s most powerful supercomputer to fight coronavirus

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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – President Trump announced Sunday evening that the federal government is deploying the world’s most powerful supercomputer in what he has described as a “war” with an “invisible enemy” – the coronavirus. And IBM is a big part of the effort.

Big Blue, which employs several thousand people across North Carolina and operates one if its most power data “cloud” centers at its large RTP campus, is partnering with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the U.S. Department of Energy along with others such as MIT in the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium.

The effort includes the Summit which is the “world’s most powerful supercomputer today is Summit, built by IBM for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee,” according to The Top 500 project. It ranks the world’s leading supercomputers.   “I[Summit] occupies the equivalent of two basketball courts and achieves an impressive 148.6 petaflops thanks to its 2.41 million cores,” according to the OpenMind website.