Argonne Taps Supercomputing Network to Study How Coronavirus Spreads 

Argonne Taps Supercomputing Network to Study How Coronavirus Spreads 

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.”


Stevens has seen a lot at Argonne, where he’s worked since 1982—but the recent collaboration sprung up by the pandemic seems almost unprecedented. He offered a glimpse into some of the lab’s high-performance computing endeavors supporting the governmentwide fight against COVID-19. 


The overall efforts include team members and assets from Argonne and Brookhaven national labs, J. Craig Venter Institute, and a range of universities including the Universities of Chicago, Illinois, Virginia, Texas, and California San Diego, as well as Rutgers, Stony Brook, and George Mason universities, the University College London—and more. Stevens said the network first started to come together several weeks ago when Argonne researchers were closely watching the spread of COVID-19 and realized “we have to get serious.”


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 essential ..

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