NASA Joins COVID-19 Supercomputing Effort
White House Announces New Partnership to Unleash U.S. Supercomputing Resources to Fight COVID-19
“The White House announced the launch of the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium to provide COVID-19 researchers worldwide with access to the world’s most powerful high performance computing resources that can significantly advance the pace of scientific discovery in the fight to stop the virus. … “We are pleased to lend NASA’s supercomputing expertise to assist in the global fight against this pandemic. For more than six decades the agency has used its expertise to take on challenges that have benefited people worldwide in unexpected ways,” said Jim Bridenstine, NASA Administrator.”
I was just thinking how nice it would be if we had some real life Emergency Medical Holographs (EMH) right now…
…containing hundreds of years’ future knowledge as well.
That would be nice on a case by case basis, but I suspect the models they are running are more large scale. People can and have put together models of how diseases spread, within and between cities. They are probably more complex than the global climate models NASA usually runs on it’s supercomputers. Those are “just” physics, and we know when water condenses as a function of temperature and pressure. But how do you predict how many college students will go skiing, despite a few cases reported at the ski resorts, and, immediately after getting home, go to big St Patrick’s day parties, despite government orders not to do so? (Ok, more than none is pretty obvious, but how many?) That sort of uncertainty means running the models many times, with different assumptions about the uncertain parameters each time. And that eats up lots of CPU hours.
I’ve not been commenting because until a few days ago logging in through Disqus was a major PIA. I usually scroll through Keith’s posts, opening each that I want to read in a tab.
Disqus required a login for each tab, including the delightful ‘spam pictures’. Tedious.
Now, though, it’s operating as it should, and as it did for many years: automatically recognizing me. I didn’t email Keith about it, assuming that the issue was Disqus’; but if it was something that Keith did, thanks, much.