How Tech Companies Are Helping Fight COVID-19 And You Can Too

The current Coronavirus crisis is impacting many families across the globe. People are losing their jobs and in more grievous cases their family members or their lives. A number of people and organizations are doing their best to support those affected by the crisis, or fight COVID-19 directly.

To find the cure to fight COVID-19, Stanford’s Folding@Home (FaH) initiative is using volunteer computing power. FaH is testing thousands of different molecules using computer models to see if a certain molecule has the right shape and properties to jam the protease COVID-19 needs to multiply.
The number of people volunteering their computing power is exploding. The FaH network, currently at 1.5-exaflops as of 4/1/20, is now faster than the fastest 100 supercomputers combined.

Tesla has offered to ship ventilators across the globe and has already supplied hundreds to New York along with BPAP machines to help fight COVID-19.

HPE is helping to provide masks, face shields, ventilators, and other critical hospital-grade equipment via 3D printing designs and its 3D printing community, as well as through manufacturing partnerships.

Google is doing a number of things, such as hosting data sets for researchers and making access to them free. Any queries related to COVID-19 will remain free until September. They have also committed DeepMind to Alpha Fold to help model the coronavirus protein for research purposes towards a cure.

IBM, in one of the most critical public health efforts yet, was able to identify 77 potential molecules for the treatment of Covid-19 by donating its Summit supercomputer to the cause.

Facebook is offering $100 million to fight COVID-19’s detriments to news outlets. As these smaller news stations are more vulnerable to a drop in ad revenue, it is critical to support them in a time when accurate news is more important than ever.

Machine learning and data analytics company, Spell, is offering free GPU compute access and resources to any companies or individuals who are fighting the coronavirus. For example, they’re making a CORD-19 kaggle data set of over 44,000 research papers available for use.

Networking giant Cisco is committing $225 million to the cause as well.

WPI is developing 3D printing designs for ventilation devices to make publicly available. These 3D printing designs could be used by any hobbyist or other corporation to make ventilation devices en masse and help fight COVID-19

Apple is contributing massive numbers of N95 masks that they accumulated last year.

Amazon is taking advantage of the explosion in fulfillment needs to add 100,000 employees to its labor force. Jeff Bezos has also personally pledged over $200 million dollars to fight COVID-19’s effects.

exIT Technologies decided to help fight COVID-19 by utilizing all the GPUs in our inventory to contribute to FaH’s computing power. While the average computer may produce 1,000 to 2,000 points per day of solving an equation. exIT’s current output is exceeding 6,000,000 per day.
We encourage you to join the fight as well and donate any extra computing power.