Rescale Partners with Google Cloud and Azure to Offer Cloud HPC for COVID-19 Researchers

Today Rescale, in cooperation with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, announced a new program that immediately offers high performance computing resources at no cost to teams working to develop test kits and vaccines for COVID-19.

Those working on coronavirus vaccines and testing who would benefit from HPC in the cloud at no cost should apply at techagainstcovid.com. Researchers can rapidly run simulations in the cloud without setup time or IT teams using Rescale’s turnkey platform combined with cloud computing resources from Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.

For decades, bioscience and pharmaceutical companies have been using high performance computing to develop and validate new solutions and drugs. With this technology now available via the cloud at no cost, researchers from around the globe can speed up COVID-19 vaccine discovery by ramping up and collaborating from anywhere.

Rescale’s platform can provide access to high-performance computing resources that can help accelerate key processes and enable stronger collaboration,” said Manvinder Singh, Director, Partnerships at Google Cloud. “As a partner of Rescale, we’re grateful that they will make these resources, including Google Cloud computing capabilities, available to more researchers and organizations.”

Greg Moore, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Health added, “We’re inspired to team up with Rescale in the fight against time to help provide answers to address COVID-19. To enable researchers and organizations to develop new therapeutics and vaccines faster, we’re working together to accelerate the availability of Azure supercomputers in the cloud.”

As a leading life sciences company, we believe it is our duty to step up and help to stop this deadly and devastating pandemic,” said Erik Holmlin, PhD, CEO of Bionano Genomics. “Bionano’s genome imaging technology can identify variation in genome structure better than any sequencing-based method, which makes us uniquely positioned to help identify variants in the human genome that can protect against or predispose to the viral infection. We have set up studies to identify such variants around the globe, and having Bionano’s bioinformatic tools already integrated onto Rescale’s high performance computing platform enables us to scale up these studies rapidly across multiple continents.”

With the introduction of cloud HPC, Rescale, a Microsoft M12 portfolio company, makes massive workloads solvable in a scalable, customized time frame. By eliminating the need to maintain an on-premises supercomputer, cloud HPC allows startups and enterprises alike to develop new drugs and vaccines faster than ever.

Leading cloud companies need to pitch in, and we have the responsibility to help in any way we can,” said Joris Poort, CEO of Rescale. “Rescale is making every effort working closely with our cloud provider partners to eliminate bottlenecks and costs so researchers achieve breakthroughs faster.”

“We will work around the clock to make these findings available to the scientific and public health communities,” said Holmlin, “and hope that we can contribute to vaccine or drug development, better triage and treatment of patients, and overall management of the disease and epidemic.”

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