NERSC Supercomputer to Help Fight Coronavirus

“NERSC is a member of the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. In support of the Consortium, NERSC has reserved a portion of its Director’s Discretionary Reserve time on Cori, a Cray XC40 supercomputer, to support COVID-19 research efforts. The GPU partition on Cori was installed to help prepare applications for the arrival of Perlmutter, NERSC’s next-generation system that is scheduled to begin arriving later this year and will rely on GPUs for much of its computational power.”

ICHEC: Satellite Data Indicates Illegal Burning in Rural Areas of Ireland During COVID-19 Shutdown

Satellite Data analyzed by scientists from ICHEC (Irish Centre for High-End Computing) using European Space Agency Sentinel 5-P satellite data shows evidence of Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) emissions in a number of rural areas during February and March 2020. “ICHEC released imagery today, April 3 in which the scientists observed general reductions in emissions (blue areas of the maps) from the lower levels of activity in the economy due to COVID-19 but also observed a few spikes (red areas) on some dates, most likely associated with fires in rural areas.”

NPR Podcast: Scientists Use Supercomputers To Search For Drugs To Combat COVID-19

In this segment from the NPR Here and Now program, Joe Palca talks to researchers using ORNL supercomputers to fight COVID-19. “Supercomputers have joined the race to find a drug that might help with COVID-19. Scientists are using computational techniques to see if any drugs already on the shelf might be effective against the disease. The two researchers performed simulations on Summit of more than 8,000 compounds to screen for those that are most likely to bind to the main “spike” protein of the coronavirus, rendering it unable to infect host cells.”

Job of the Week: Research Scientist at the University of Wyoming

The Center of Innovation for Flow through Porous media (COIFPM) at the University of Wyoming has multiple openings for highly motivated research scientists to join its computational research branch. The focus of the modeling team is to develop advanced computational tools to simulate multiphase flow and transport in porous materials. To this end, we utilize high-performance computing techniques to build innovative and highly parallelized computer platforms that are tested on powerful supercomputers and validated against experimental data.

LLNL Researchers aid COVID-19 response in anti-viral research

Backed by five high performance computing (HPC) clusters and years of expertise in vaccine and countermeasure development, a COVID-19 response team of LLNL researchers from various disciplines has used modeling & simulation, along with machine learning, to identify about 20 initial, yet promising, antibody designs from a nearly infinite set of potentials and to examine millions of small molecules that could have anti-viral properties. The candidates will need to be synthesized and experimentally tested — which Lab researchers cautioned could take time — but progress is being made.

Podcast: Supercomputing the Coronavirus on Frontera

Scientists are preparing a massive computer model of the coronavirus that they expect will give insight into how it infects in the body. They’ve taken the first steps, testing the first parts of the model and optimizing code on the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of UT Austin. The knowledge gained from the full model can help researchers design new drugs and vaccines to combat the coronavirus.

Urban Seismology in Megacities: the Los Angeles BASIN Experiment

Dr. Patricia Persaud from Louisiana State University gave this talk in a recent IRIS webinar. “Our goal is to first map the structure of the basins in the Los Angeles area, and to integrate the basins’ structure into computer simulations of ground motion. As part of the BASIN project, we have deployed 744 nodal seismometers along 10 densely-spaced seismic profiles in the greater Los Angeles area.”

Podcast: Supercomputers Drive Ion Transport Research

In this TACC podcat, host Jorge Salazar discusses ion transport research with Amir Haji-Akbari, an assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering at Yale University. “Scientists are using supercomputers to help understand the relatively rare event of salts in water passing through atomically-thin nanoporous membranes. This research could not only help make progress in desalination for fresh water; it has applications in decontaminating the environment, better pharmaceuticals, and more.”

Supercomputing Perovskite Solar Cells

In this special guest feature, Santina Russo from CSCS writes that scientists are using the “Piz Daint” supercomputer at CSCS to investigate a perovskite material for use in solar cells. “Solar cells made out of certain perovskite materials already exceed 22% efficiency in converting solar light to electrical energy under lab conditions, which is more than commercial silicon cells. However, not all perovskite materials exhibit such favorable properties, and the physics behind their photovoltaic performance is not yet fully known. Understanding these processes is important, since this will facilitate the design of new materials with favorable properties in the future.”

Breakthrough Coronavirus Research Results in New Map to Support Vaccine Design

Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and the National Institutes of Health have made a critical breakthrough toward developing a vaccine for the 2019 novel coronavirus by creating the first 3D atomic scale map of the part of the virus that attaches to and infects human cells. “Mapping this part, called the spike protein, is an essential step so researchers around the world can develop vaccines and antiviral drugs to combat the virus. The paper was published Feb. 19 in the journal Science.”