The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Department of Energy (DoE), and a quintet of the world’s largest cloud and technology providers launched a high performance computing (HPC) program designed to ease access to the nation’s supercomputers to help with research tied to the ongoing COVID-19 virus outbreak.

The “public-private” program is spearheaded by IBM on the “private” side, and it includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Also on board are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

The government lineup includes the Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, the National Science Foundation, and NASA.

The group is inviting research submissions for access to free compute time and resources on HPC equipment. Those submissions will be reviewed by a panel of scientists and computing researchers “to assess the public health benefit of the work, with emphasis on projects that can ensure rapid results.”

The group is initially providing pooled access to portions of 16 supercomputing systems, representing more than 330 petaflops, 775,000 CPU cores, and 34,000 GPUs.

Dario Gil, director of IBM Research, explained in a blog post that those assets will “allow researchers to run very large numbers of calculations in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling. These experiments would take years to complete if worked by hand, or months if handled on slower, traditional computing platforms.”

The move follows what has been a flood of tech-related initiatives tied to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Microsoft and Google last week announced plans to donate cloud computing resources to scientists and researchers working on test kits and vaccines for COVID-19. They also teamed up with Rescale to begin offering HPC and cloud resources to researchers as part of the Tech Against Covid program.

China-based Alibaba Cloud last week also made available HPC resources to researchers and artificial intelligence (AI) cloud services to medical personnel around the globe to fight the pandemic.