The LNCC (National Laboratory for Scientific Computing) based in the Rio De Janeiro City of Petropolis, Brazil has made its supercomputer Santos Dumont available for scientific research related to coronavirus, under this initiative, researchers will have free access to the NVIDIA’s Parabricks software for optimizing research tasks.
Processing power plays a very important role, as it helps researchers with simulations, providing them the ability to analyze more data, leverage statistical algorithms, and explore theoretical models. Simulation helps in research by imitating physical processes and responses in a virtual environment. But, for simulation processing power is paramount, and supercomputers have tons on processing power.
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The Santos Dumont, the supercomputer in limelight here has a total capacity of 5.1 petaflops. The LNCC says that the supercomputer is already being used for 3 corona-virus related pieces of research.
This initiative will highly speed up the research tasks as it has the capability to reduce the time required to analyze an entire human genome from 2 days to less than an hour. In addition to this, the Santos Dumont is already being used for 150 projects, ranging from drug development to oil drilling and renewable energy. The Santos Dumont, launched in 2015 is the largest supercomputer in Latin America and is composed of three systems, the Santos Dumont CPU, the Santos Dumont GPU, and the Santos Dumont Hybrid. The supercomputer places 193rd in the Top 500 ranking of global supercomputers.
