Covid: ENEA supercomputer, over 450 thousand computational hours to fight the pandemic
30/9/2021
Over 450,000 computing hours and 3,600 numerical simulations for studies and measures to combat the pandemic, with the objective of identifying novel molecular drugs against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, measuring its spread in indoor conditions and creating physical barriers for infection prevention. For just over a year of the Covid-19 pandemic, these have been the main activities performed by CRESCO6 -the ENEA supercomputer which ranks second in Italy for computing capacity in the field of public research- as shown in the report "ENEA CRESCO in the fight against COVID-19" by the ENEA Division “Development of Systems for the IT and ICT”.
In particular, 30% of CRESCO6 computational power was used in collaboration with external research institutions in the fight against Covid-19, for an amount of hours valued approximately 600 thousand euro. The remaing 70% were instead used for environmental and energy purposes to develop forecast models on climate change and atmospheric pollution, study new materials for production and storage of renewable energy sources, make simulations for critical infrastructures safety, biotechnology, computational chemistry, fluid dynamics for the aerospace sector and develop nuclear fusion codes.
CRESCO6 of the ENEA Research Center in Portici (Naples) entered 420th place in 2018 in the prestigious TOP500 of the most powerful computing infrastructures in the world, thanks to a doubling of power reaching 1.4 million billion mathematical operations per second (1.4 PetaFlops).
It’s still possible to request access to HPC CRESCO computational resources by writing to crescoforcovid19@enea.it
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