PODCAST: Land of the tech giants as mega computer joins war on COVID-19

Professor Dale Godfrey has been featured in The Australian’s Forward Slash podcast to discuss the potential of a new supercomputer in the race for an effective COVID-19 treatment.

Several of the world’s technology giants, including IBM, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Intel, have pooled their computing resources with governments and universities to form the COVID-19 High Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium.

The HPC Consortium is providing 483 petaflops of processing power – more than 438 million gigabytes per second – towards the COVID-19 challenge globally.

Photograph of the Anton supercomputer. The room is dark and the mainframe is surrounded by blue light.

This episode of The Australian’s Forward Slash podcast investigates how these technological developments are being harnessed in the search for a COVID-19 vaccine.

It also explores how such collaborations are changing the way scientific research is performed, unifying those who would normally be competitors through working towards a common goal.

Professor Dale Godfrey, a Laboratory Head in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunology (Doherty Institute), was featured in the episode to discuss these changes in scientific culture.

Professor Godfrey spoke about being part of the Global Virus Network, through which researchers around the globe have been sharing their developments and successes via Zoom.

“It’s very open and relaxed; it’s not very formal,” he said. “It’s quite good fun, actually, to exchange ideas and discoveries about what’s going on and what’s working.

“And it has certainly found an important role in supporting COVID research, and I think the international community spirit that’s coming out won’t go away.”

Listen to the podcast below and read the full story in The Australian.

Listen to the podcast

A graphic depicting a widget for the Forward Slash podcast.