Covid-19 Response

Updated 4/22/2020

With the nation—and the world—disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, we at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) would like to offer our wishes for safety and health for all. To do our part in protecting the country’s wellbeing, we have been working with a national alliance of high performance computing resources called the COVID-19 HPC Consortium. As part of this effort, computing time on our Bridges, Bridges-AI and Anton 2 platforms is being allotted to urgent COVID-19 computational research. By making these resources available at no cost to scientists, we hope to support the development of new treatments to aid people who have contracted the virus and to limit its spread.

HOW BRIDGES AND BRIDGES-AI CAN HELP COVID-19 RESEARCH

Bridges and Bridges-AI offer exceptional capabilities rarely found elsewhere for critical areas of research. PSC’s expert User Support staff are available to promptly help get new projects started. Areas where Bridges and Bridges-AI offer specific, unique strengths are:

  • Artificial Intelligence: Bridges-AI delivers scalable deep learning for memory- and compute-intensive networks (e.g., SciBERT) through an NVIDIA DGX-2 (16 tightly-coupled Volta GPUs and 1.5TB RAM) and nine HPE servers with 8 Volta GPUs each.
  • Genomics: Bridges’ large-memory servers with 12TB and 3TB of RAM are the premier resource for de novo sequence assembly, and Bridges as a whole is well-suited to variant calling and bioinformatic workflows.
  • Collaborative workflows: Secure web portals can be configured using Bridges’ servers that are dedicated to serving persistent databases and websites, allowing efficient coordination among distributed teams. See https://covid19.galaxyproject.org for information on how the assembly portions of workflows on usegalaxy.org will be running on Bridges’ LM nodes.

See more on the capabilities of Bridges and Bridges-AI for COVID-19 research

Bridges and Bridges-AI are available at no cost for COVID-19 research. To apply, please submit your request at the COVID-19 HPC Consortium website. If you have any questions, please contact us at help@psc.edu.

HOW ANTON 2 CAN HELP COVID-19 RESEARCH

Anton was developed by D. E. Shaw Research to execute molecular dynamics simulations of biomolecules (e.g., proteins, nucleic acids, and lipids), and their interactions with natural signaling molecules and drug  candidates, orders of magnitude faster than was previously possible. Anton’s speed provides a unique capability for fast turnaround of ultra-long-timescale molecular modeling, enabling observation of important biological events.

Due to the special nature of Anton 2, proposals for Anton 2 submitted to the COVID-19 HPC Consortium must include additional, critical information unique to Anton2.

See more on how to apply for Anton 2 time for COVID-19 research

Anton 2 is available at no cost for COVID-19 research.  If you have any questions, please contact us at help@psc.edu.

ONGOING STATUS OF PSC DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

PSC will continue normal operations throughout the pandemic. Our staff is working remotely to support all research and operations activities.  We will continue to provide normal support and operations to all our users, but some research may be affected by the priority we will give to COVID-19 research projects. Extensions will be available to users affected by this if needed.

Further updates will be posted here, @psc_live on twitter, and our email lists. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us at help@psc.edu.