DOE official lauds federal-academic-industry approach to COVID-19

In an interview with ScienceNode (SN) published in early April, Department of Energy Undersecretary of Science Paul Dabbar discussed the polyglot nature of the COVID-19 HPC Consortium (led by the DOE, IBM, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy) and the importance of collaborations that bring together federal, academic, and industry resources.

SN: What strengths do academic institutions bring to the Consortium?

Dabbar: Clearly, academic institutions bring researchers. Some certainly bring HPC capacity, like University of Texas at Austin and University of Illinois, and others. But clearly, a strength of academia is also the research breadth. There are universities all over the country, and they've been doing research in these areas for a long time. Across this country, researchers from academia want to jump in, and they have great ideas on how to attack this.

The federal government is the biggest funder of grants in the country for researchers. And so we're very used to working with the broad research community on all sorts of different topics. We know them well, we know how to fund them, we know how to communicate with them, we speak the same language between needs and research.

It’s great having this HPC Consortium to say, “Hey, we have even more resources available than ever before because of the public-private partnership aspect, please bring us your ideas and we'll screen them quickly as a consortium and give you access quickly.”

We’re very excited about academia. There are already many proposals that are being submitted and are already being screened, and are already being allocated. We're already off and running.

SN: You’ve previously worked in the public, private, and academic sectors. The COVID-19 HPC Consortium is uniting people from all three of these areas. What’s it like watching them all come together?

Dabbar: I think it's particularly exciting in this consortium that a large group of tech companies decided to volunteer and to support this critical time in public health for the world. I think a lot of us in the administration right now come from both a public and a private background.

When the idea came up of having the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Google, Amazon Web Service, and HPE/Cray all wanting to contribute, to try to help drive the solutions for the COVID crisis, our immediate reaction was, "Yes, and how do we organize that?"

It certainly comes from a mindset of “How do we work together?” IBM is one of our major partners in building supercomputers at our labs. So, we're very well-aligned day-to-day. But I think it is truly a testament to the country and this particular segment of the economy to see Microsoft, Google, Amazon, HPE, and IBM all coming together and volunteering their resources and their people.

Seeing the tech companies all come together and say, “This is a problem for humankind. We're here to volunteer, we have resources, we want to help.” I find it very exciting that they volunteered, and I think we're off to a good start in this public-private partnership.

Read the entire interview at ScienceNode: https://sciencenode.org/feature/This%20is%20a%20problem%20for%20humankin...