The UK will be the first country, outside the US, to join the global COVID-19 High Performance Computing (HPC) consortium was announced on Thursday 28 May.

The consortium, launched by the US in response to the global pandemic, will allow the UK’s world-leading researchers and scientists to gain access to the world’s largest and fastest supercomputers and perform complex calculations quickly. This will rapidly accelerate UK coronavirus research, helping further treatments, knowledge and understanding of how the disease behaves through advanced modelling.

Bringing together government, industry, and academic leaders, the consortium has 40 members including IBM, US Department of Energy, Google and NASA. It has already supported 59 research projects, all running on high performance computing machines - including London based AI start up, Kuano, which is using the facilities to gain insights from diseases similar to COVID-19, such as SARs, to help design a new drug to defeat the virus.

The announcement was made during the G7 Science and Technology Ministerial held on 28 May, with the UK represented by Minister Solloway and John Whittingdale, Minister for Media and Data.

During the virtual meeting of science and technology ministers, the G7 nations set out a shared vision on tackling the pandemic. As a result, the UK committed to enhancing cooperation on shared COVID-19 research priority areas and launching a global partnership on artificial intelligence.

Source of information: publlished on 28 May by  Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, Amanda Solloway MP, and The Rt Hon John Whittingdale OBE MP

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