Published on November 19, 2020 by Rachel Harken, ORNL / Jorge Salazar, TACC
Research by team at Argonne National Laboratory, UC San Diego leads to a novel understanding of SARS-CoV-2; research supported by ORNL’s Summit and TACC’s Frontera supercomputers
From the ongoing peril of climate change, to the pandemic raging around us, advanced computing is helping scientists and researchers combat urgent crises.
Across the world, hundreds of scientists log into the mainframe, creating simulations as grand as a replica of the city of Austin for tracking the coronavirus’ spread, and as microscopic as a model of the virus itself that can help vaccine scientists destroy it.
UT epidemiologist Lauren Ancel Meyers spent her career planning for infectious disease outbreaks. She has had to rapidly adapt to the very different challenges posed by the novel coronavirus.
Supercomputers provide scientists who are studying COVID-19 with unique capabilities: they can explore the structure and behavior of the virus at the molecular level while designing drugs and forecasting the spread of the disease much faster than would otherwise be possible.
