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The global crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic outbreak produces opportunities for public sharing of global knowledge and computing resources in order to rapidly find solutions for the benefit of the global public. Limits and barriers previously kept strictly are being broken, with the emergence of more and more open source and open access academic resources.

More engineers, medical students and others trying to develop respirators have been sharing their findings for the benefit of global effort. An MIT team developing respirators has already submitted the technology to the FDA for rapid review has recently launched a website unveiling their E-Vent project. They call anyone that is capable of producing the systems or provide feedback or expertise to take part, according to technologyreview.com.

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There are also more local sharing initiatives, such as the UK Newspeak House group that has established a crowdsourcing information collection platform regarding the disease, including links to open source programs.

Sharing is also evident in the recruitment of computing power. A project that originally started at a Stanford lab calls for owners of powerful computers to recruit to the quest of a coronavirus vaccine. According to howtogeek.com, the distributed computing project folding@home will use spare GPU power to run calculations by installing and running the software in the background. Hundreds of thousands of users have already been working together for the benefit of empowering computing power in order to advance science. The software has previously been used to help find cures to cancer, Parkinson’s, etc. but now the project concentrated on the coronavirus.

Graphics cards are obviously a useful tool for gaming, video editing, and even cryptocurrency mining. NVIDIA has called for gamers to install folding@home and donate any spare computing power they might have. In recent days, computing power has exceeded 1.5 ExaFLOPS of performance, making this network around 10 times faster than the world’s fastest supercomputer, as reported by techspot.com.

A number of world-leading publishers – Willey, Sage, Oxford – are contributing to the global effort to find solutions to the coronavirus crisis, offering open access to databases regarding research and teaching materials, books and articles on medical, social sciences, webinars, instruction videos, etc.

To assist health workers and researchers working under challenging conditions to bring this outbreak to a close, the Lancet has created a Coronavirus Resource Centre. This resource brings together new content from across the Lancet journals as it is published. 

Learn more about innovative data technologies – Attend i-HLS’ InnoTech Expo in Tel Aviv – Israel’s largest innovation, HLS, and cyber technologies expo – on November 18-19, 2020 at Expo Tel Aviv, Pavilion 2.

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