“Argonne National Laboratory is leading and coordinating a variety of computational efforts to better understand both the COVID-19 disease and the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes it—and to help accelerate the development of treatment options like antiviral drugs and vaccines.”
“The Energy Department’s Illinois-based lab officials are pooling assets with others from a range of labs, universities and private research centers to jointly maximize the use of some top supercomputing resources to address the global health emergency caused by the novel coronavirus.”
“’You’re trying to do years worth of work in months or days,’ Argonne’s Associate Laboratory Director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences Rick Stevens recently told Nextgov about the work. ‘So, you know, we’re kind of inventing how fast we can push these things—and of course, we’re using methods that are really new…’”
“Officials aimed to run cycles of a range of simulations, programs and models on the Argonne’s supercomputers to ideally arrive at new breakthroughs against the nascent virus. Stevens said cycles are essentially the ‘computer geek slang name for running on a processor.’ They involve running an application continuously on a machine for durations that can last an hour, 100 hours or 1,000 hours, he said. And so upon that initial realization, he and his team started putting out calls to ‘friends,’ and the broader supercomputing community to get efforts up and running…”
“It’s been several weeks since the Argonne team put out the first calls, and now the cadre of experts involved are working collaboratively from around the country, coordinating remotely over email and messaging services, and sharing data over the relevant infrastructures and Globus, a University of Chicago-run non-profit, secure research data management service.”
“Less than a month in, that network is ‘kind of running nonstop,’ Stevens said. He went on to highlight what some of the efforts entail—and aim to accomplish…” Read the full article here.
Source: Argonne Taps Supercomputing Network to Study How Coronavirus Spreads – By Brandi Vincent, April 2, 2020. Nextgov.
