A team of authors from the PRACE Scientific Steering Committee, the PRACE Access Committee, the PRACE Governance, and directors of European supercomputing centres, summarised the lessons learned from the ‘PRACE Fast Track Call for Proposals to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic’ in a paper entitled ‘Lessons learned from urgent computing in Europe: Tackling the COVID-19 pandemic’. This summary, including recommendations for future initiatives was published as published online at: www.pnas.org with DOI number 10.1073/pnas.2024891118.
The paper analyses various scientific efforts undertaken in Europe to combat the COVID-19 pandemic based on advanced and computationally intensive numerical simulations that require the use of large-scale computers. The five largest European supercomputing centres supported some of these efforts with free-of-charge computational resources, through the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE).
The paper presents a number of computational models and methods relevant to the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, including bio-structural studies, docking and screening for pharmaceutical applications, computational fluid dynamics to study droplet spread and transmission of the virus, organ modelling to support diagnosis and treatment of the disease, and epidemiology. We discuss the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in these areas and the readiness of the codes to run on high-performance computers.
As an international association, we are proud of this publication, as both the activities from which the content of the paper is drawn, as well as the creation of the paper itself, show the high level of cross-border and cross-disciplinary collaboration and exchange that we are continuously striving for.
Serge Bogaerts, Managing Director of PRACE aisbl.
To find the full paper go here https://www.pnas.org/content/118/46/e2024891118 or download the PDF at the end of this announcement.
