HPC & COVID-19: The HPC Community’s Effort to Respond

HPC has been a tremendous enabler of advances in healthcare and medical research for many years. And as you’d expect, HPC is helping scientists get a lead on the coronavirus and its impacts on human health.

 

Japanese Researchers Use Fugaku, the World’s Fastest Supercomputer, to Simulate Air Particle Movement Resulting in Recommended Procedures for Reducing COVID-19 Spread

Via DailyMail.com

World’s fastest supercomputer that has been running simulations to determine how best to reduce the spread of COVID-19 recommends open train windows and limiting passengers as well we using floor-to-ceiling curtains around hospital beds. Read full article

 

Fighting COVID with Computing: Fermilab, Brookhaven, and Open Science Grid Dedicate Computational Power to COVID-19 Research

Via Brookhaven National Laboratory

During the times that select Fermilab and Brookhaven computers get a break from particle collision analysis, they’re free to crunch data outside particle physics. That’s where the Open Science Grid comes in. Among other tasks, the OSG evaluates research proposals to determine which are a good fit for its networks. In offering its resources to COVID-19 proposals, it provided the kind of vetting that the labs wouldn’t have been able to assume on their own. Read full article

 

ORNL Team Enlists World’s Fastest Supercomputer to Combat the Coronavirus

Via Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Simulations of more than 8000 small-molecule drug compounds to screen for those that could bind to a protein in coronaviruses and disable it from infecting host cells have been performed on the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The S-protein spike is present in both the virus responsible for the SARS epidemic of 2003 and the COVID-19 disease. The systematic screening of compounds reduced the original set of 8000 down to a more reasonable 77 small-molecule drug compounds that can potentially undergo experimental testing. Thanks to Summit, the simulations took only a day or two, saving valuable time that can be used by experimental researchers to focus on a manageable number of options for stopping the coronavirus. Read full article

 

Supercomputers Playing a Significant Role in COVID-19 Research

Via TechRepublic

Initiatives are underway to predict where the virus will spread and analyze how effective preventive measures are, according to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Read full article

 

Researchers Tackle the Flu with Breakthrough Virus Simulations

Via UC San Diego News Center

Supercomputing power applied to records of historical pandemics, such as the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic which killed more than 200,000 people, can help us fight new diseases. A team from the University of California at San Diego built an all-atom, solvated, and experimentally based integrative model of pH1N1 (the H1N1 flu virus) on the Blue Waters supercomputer hosted by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Using this model of the entire viral envelope, which consisted of more than 160 million atoms, they examined two binding sites on the flu’s viral proteins. For the first time they were able to understand how flu proteins on the surface of the virus interact with each other. From this research, new anti-influenza therapeutics may be developed. Read full article

 

How Supercomputers Are Getting Us Closer to a COVID-19 Vaccine

Via The Hill

The global scientific community has joined forces in an unprecedented effort to understand, track, forecast, test for, and find a cure for the current coronavirus pandemic. But in a crisis where every second lost means more loss of lives, solidarity alone isn’t enough. Supercomputers are enabling a vastly accelerated pace by which scientists can conduct research and collect and analyze data. Never have they proven their value to society more than during this COVID-19 pandemic. Read full article

 

Researcher Say Spread of Coronavirus Extends Far Beyond China’s Quarantine Zone

Via Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)

Epidemiologists have been using the Wrangler supercomputer at UT Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center to model the spread of the coronavirus. The team used historical travel data for the busy Spring Festival season to chart movements between 371 Chinese cities, yielding a more accurate model than could be created on a desktop computer. Read full article

 

Share Your Research News

If you or your organization is involved in virus- or pandemic-related research, please share your news with the SC20 Communications Team so we can highlight how HPC is making a positive impact in the world. 

—

Christine E. Cuicchi, SC20 General Chair