Just in case you’ve forgotten, there's a pandemic going on and researchers are still racing to better understand the coronavirus, advance testing efforts, and find a cure. In March, some of the world’s largest cloud companies began coming to their aid, giving researchers massive compute power for free in their efforts to advance research. 

Holding to its commitment, Google Cloud today is adding a new high-performance computing (HPC) tool to the therapeutics research arsenal with the beta launch of its Filestore High Scale.

In a blog announcement, Google Cloud product managers Tad Hunt and Allon Cohen call this “the next step in the evolution of Google’s file storage product” that includes assets acquired from its Elastifile purchase last year. Combining Elastifile and Google Cloud will make it easier to manage and scale newer data- and compute-intensive workloads.

“As researchers, we hardly have the time to invest in learning how to set up and manage a needlessly complicated file system cluster or to constantly monitor the health of our storage system,” said Christoph Gorgulla, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School’s Wagner Lab, in a prepared statement. Gorgulla uses Google Cloud’s scale-out file storage to enable his VirtualFlow virtual screening program for COVID-19 therapeutics.  

“We needed a file system that could handle the load generated concurrently by thousands of clients, which have hundreds of thousands of [virtual CPUs]," Gorgulla added. "Much of the Filestore setup is automated, we’re able to scale up our capacity on the fly and also actively monitor the speed of our workflows in a simple, graphical interface.”

As scientists, health policy experts, and researchers are wading through uncharted territory, so too is the IT infrastructure. “Processing jobs like molecular screening require massive computational power, as well as high-performance, high-throughput storage beneath it,” Google's Hunt and Cohen wrote.

Whether migrating traditional applications, modernizing existing applications, or scaling to meet the performance demands of big compute workloads, Filestore targets these challenges so that scientists and researchers can work faster and without technology barriers. 

Filestore is built to serve electronic design automation (EDA) workloads that require high performance and capacity such as video processing, genomics, manufacturing, and financial modeling. It also features predictable performance for scale-out file storage in the cloud, and the ability to scale a file system on demand. 

It also has a console that allows users to automate management through Google Cloud and API calls, and uses Cloud Monitoring to monitor file systems and integrate them into HPC workload management scheduling systems. “You get the power and performance of a distributed scale-out file system, and since it’s a fully managed service you get the same ease of management of other Google Cloud products,” Hunt and Cohen write. 

The launch also adds beta support for network file system (NFS) IP-based access controls to all Google Cloud Filestore tiers that enables access control for clients on a virtual private cloud (VPC).

Google's cloud rivals Microsoft and Amazon have also been donating massive compute power for free — and, in some cases investing millions of dollars — to scientists and researchers working on test kits and vaccines for COVID-19. 

Most recently, Amazon Web Services (AWS) committed at least $20 million for COVID-19 diagnostic research and testing via its AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative. The program is open to accredited research institutions and private entities that use AWS to run research-oriented workloads related to point-of-care diagnostics. This is testing that can be done at home or at a clinic with same-day results.

Amazon previously committed $1 million to launch a Washington-based coronavirus response fund. Microsoft matched that commitment and the fund grew to more than $9 million in three days.

Microsoft, Google, and Rescale in March teamed up to offer free HPC resources to researchers. Tech Against Covid allows researchers to run simulations using Rescale’s platform combined with Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure cloud computing resources without setup time or IT teams  Running these workloads in the cloud means that researchers don’t need an on-premises supercomputer and they can contribute and share data from anywhere across the globe.