AsianScientist (Mar. 24, 2020) – A special call for projects has been issued by the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore for research into coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
The COVID-19 call for projects was put out on March 23, 2020 and will run from now till September 2020. This special call comes outside regular call-for-project cycles, which happen twice a year.
“The [Singapore] government is treating the COVID-19 situation not as a medical crisis but as a national crisis,” said Mr. Peter Ho, chairman of the NSCC steering committee.
Applicants will benefit from a fast-tracked approval process shortened to just two weeks from the typical 12 weeks. The applications will be reviewed by a selection committee comprising bioinformatics and molecular biology experts from Singapore’s high performance computing (HPC) community.
Successful applicants will be placed on a priority queue for accessing HPC systems available in Singapore, such as the ASPIRE 1 petascale supercomputer with 1,288 nodes of CPU and 128 accelerator nodes with NVIDIA K40 GPUs, an AI system with six state-of-the-art 8-GPU NVIDIA DGX-1 with V100 cards, and 13 petabytes of high performance storage.
“Speed is one of the key elements which global experts have cited as a leading factor in helping to resolve the pandemic,” said Associate Professor Tan Tin Wee, NSCC chief executive.
“Supercomputers can play a crucial role in speeding up research whether it is in detecting the virus, tracing the infected, studying mutations in the coronavirus genome, building faster test kits or developing vaccines for the virus.”
Asian Scientist Magazine is a media partner of National Supercomputing Centre Singapore.
———
Source: National Supercomputing Center Singapore; Photo: Shutterstock.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.
