The National Center for Atmospheric Research announced Monday it is joining the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium.
NCAR will provide the consortium with access to its Cheyenne supercomputer out of Wyoming to help research the pandemic.
“It’s an opportunity for NCAR to give back to the country in a way that’s not in our normal scope of effort,” said David Hart, user services manager at NCAR, a research institute in Boulder funded by the National Science Foundation.
Hart brought the idea of joining the consortium to NCAR leadership and said they jumped at the chance. He called it “too good to pass up.”
“We provide these computers all the time to researchers in atmospheric sciences,” Hart said, “but this was an opportunity for us to contribute to the fight against the pandemic.”
The launch of the COVID-19 HPC Consortium was announced by the White House on March 23. The goal of the consortium is to provide world-class computing resources to COVID-19 researchers globally.
The effort is being led by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the U.S. Department of Energy and IBM. Numerous universities, industries, federal agencies and national laboratories are involved, including NASA, Microsoft and Google Cloud.
“The availability of all of these resources is a very unique situation for the county,” Hart said. “Many of these resources have specific purposes and were designed to pursue specific avenues of research. … The consortium brought all these resources together.”
Antonio Busalacchi, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research which manages NCAR, called the consortium “vital for accelerating research into this pandemic.”
“At this challenging time, it is essential to marshal the nation’s most advanced scientific resources to learn more about COVID-19 and bring it under control,” Busalacchi said. “We are very pleased to join this unique partnership.”
The Cheyenne supercomputer is one of the 50 fastest in the world. It is a 5.34-petaflop machine, meaning it is capable of performing 5.34 quadrillion calculations per second.
The research through the consortium aims to help gain insight into the behavior of the virus, transmission patterns and the development of treatment and vaccines.
Anjuli Bamzai, director of the NSF Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, said in a statement he is happy to provide the consortium with access to the Cheyenne supercomputer.
“Cheyenne and other NSF-funded, high-end computing resources will enable the nation’s research community to pursue advanced modeling using artificial intelligence techniques and other approaches to gain vital insights into COVID-19 and potential strategies for protecting society,” he said.
Normally, the Cheyenne supercomputer is used for research in atmospheric and related sciences. Hart said he hopes it will be used to support and identify similar projects, like how the virus reacts to seasonal changes and different types of weather.
For now, NCAR does not have a project on its system as Hart said they are waiting for proposals from researchers. The consortium usually receives two to five proposal requests per day.
“NCAR is very excited to be able to contribute this resource,” Hart said. “We hope there are projects out there and researchers out there who can come up with projects to take advantage of it and help solve the problem.”
For more information about the consortium go to covid19-hpc-consortium.org. COVID-19 researchers can submit research proposals to the consortium at xsede.org/covid19-hpc-consortium.
