Displaying items by tag: world's fastest computer

New York Times: Oak Ridge supercomputer simulates spread of Covid-19 in water droplets

Scientists studying the spread of the novel coronavirus utilized the world’s second-fastest computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to model the movements of millions of individual atoms that make up the virus and aerosols that can transport and transmit it. 

The virus has killed nearly 1 million Americans and infected more than 50 million since a pandemic was declared in early 2020.

“The researchers started by creating a model of the coronavirus, known as SARS-CoV-2, from 300 million virtual atoms,” the New York Times reported.

Researchers then placed the virtual virus model in an intricately detailed and microscopic model of a water droplet such as the type exhaled by those infected with the virus. The supercomputer then calculated how the droplet and its attendant virus could, for example, move within a room where people are in close quarters and exhaling and inhaling the virus.

To carry out this vast set of calculations, the researchers had to take over the Summit Supercomputer, the second most powerful supercomputer in the world.