U.S. Stock Futures Sink as Washington Struggles Over Rescue Plan: Live Updates
Computing power is made available to researchers.
A coalition of tech companies and outside laboratories will work to provide computing resources to researchers trying to treat the coronavirus, the White House announced on Sunday night. Researchers will apply for access to the computing power of private companies like IBM, Google and Amazon, along with several national laboratories and academic institutions. President Trump said at a news conference that the consortium would help “researchers discover new treatments and vaccines.”
“These high-performance computing systems allow researchers to run very large numbers of calculations in epidemiology, bioinformatics and molecular modeling,” Dario Gil, the director of IBM research, said in a blog post. He said the same calculations would take months on slower systems.
In total, the technical systems mobilized as part of the effort announced Sunday include more than 775,000 CPU cores, a central processing component of a computer, according to IBM; the most powerful MacBook Pro laptop has eight.
Shipping workers are worried about the health of their workplaces.
Hour after hour, day after day, the packages keep arriving: food, medicine, clothes, toys and a million other items brought to the doorsteps and building lobbies of Americans who are hunkering down as the coronavirus spreads and shuts down certain stores.
An increasing number of the workers sorting, loading and transporting those boxes have fallen sick, suffering from coughs, sore throats, aches and fevers consistent with the coronavirus. Yet they are still reporting for their shifts in crowded shipping facilities and warehouses and truck depots, fearful of what will happen if they don’t. More than 30 employees of UPS, FedEx and XPO Logistics said in interviews and emails that they were worried that their warehouses and trucks had become breeding grounds for the virus.
The shipping companies say they have urged employees to take any illnesses seriously and provided information and supplies to help them manage health risks.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/business/stock-market-today-live.html