Riken has joined the Covid-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, an international effort to use supercomputing to help fight the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Japanese research institute operates Fugaku, which was this week named the world's most powerful supercomputer, at 415.53 petaflops of peak performance.

Every flop helps

Fugaku
– Fugaku

Fugaku is currently being used for Covid-19 research under a program promoted by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT).

As a member of the consortium, the Riken Center for Computational Sciences will collaborate with MEXT to provide computational and data resources to researchers around the world and to share the results of research carried out in the United States and Japan as well as other countries that are part of the consortium.

The consortium was originally set up by IBM, the Department of Energy, and the White House in March, but quickly grew to include hundreds of petaflops of compute power, major cloud providers, and more than 56 research teams.

Excluding Fugaku, the consortium currently boasts 485 petaflops of computing power across 5m CPU cores and 50,000 GPUs. Its work spans everything from looking for a complete vaccine, to therapeutic treatments, to modeling how the virus spreads.

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