In support of Livermore’s research, the Laboratory operates a major computing center, Livermore Computing (LC), one of the most prominent and consistently successful computer centers in the world. Among its many computational assets, LC is home to some of the most powerful computers, several of which are capable of petascale computing (1015 floating point operations per second). These computers use tens of thousands of cores (central and graphics processing units) running at the same time—known as parallel processing.
The Laboratory is participating in a White House initiative to provide COVID-19 researchers worldwide with access to the world’s most powerful high performance computing (HPC) resources that can significantly advance the pace of scientific discovery in the fight to stop the virus. For example, LLNL's Corona supercomputing cluster, which will be used by COVID-19 researchers, is undergoing upgrades to nearly double the system’s peak compute power. (See news links below for information about additional HPC systems dedicated to COVID-19 research.)
Researchers are invited to submit COVID-19 related research proposals to the consortium via the online portal, which will then be reviewed and matched with computing resources from one of the partner institutions. An expert panel of top scientists and computing researchers will coordinate with proposers to quickly assess the public health benefit of the work and coordinate the allocation of the group’s powerful computing assets.
Additional information about the HPC systems used in this effort is available on the LLNL Computing website: Resources at the Ready and Specialized Workloads.
