Microsoft’s undersea data centre to power the hunt for Covid-19 vaccine

Microsoft has deployed an experimental shipping-container-size undersea data centre in Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The data centre is processing workloads for a globally distributed computing project aimed at understanding the viral proteins that cause Covid-19 disease.

The project is also working to design therapeutics to prevent the coronavirus.

The globally distributed computing project “Folding@home” had launched in October 2000. The project aims to harness computing power from otherwise idle computers around the world for bigger and resource-intensive computing tasks. The project also covers issues such as infectious disease and climate change among others.

From a technology point of view, Microsoft believes the data centre is a big milestone for the company’s Project Natick, which aims to resolve benefits and difficulties in deploying subsea datacenters worldwide.

“Folding@home was one of the first distributed computing groups to start working on COVID-related problems and immediately came out with a bunch of workloads that were geared toward finding antibodies and figuring out ways they could create immunizations,” said Spencer Fowers, a principal member of technical staff for Microsoft’s special projects research group.

The team is also leveraging its AI for Health initiative to use the necessary resources to run simulations for Covid-19 proteins. According to Greg Bowman, the director of Folding@home and an associate professor at Washington University, the computing efforts have already helped search sites on the virus that potential drugs can attach to.

Microsoft’s new initiative is in addition to its partition in the White House-led consortium to fight Covid-19 pandemic. The consortium, which features the likes of IBM, Amazon and Google, is enabling high computing resources to the scientists. IBM had revealed it is providing 16 systems with over 330 petaflops, 775,000 CPU cores, 34,000 GPUs, and more to researchers.