The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the entire planet, and researchers continue to investigate its catalyst: the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its variants. Discovering variants of concern (VOCs) quickly can save lives by giving scientists time to develop effective vaccines and treatments — but existing variant-tracking methods can be slow. A team of researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, along with university and industry collaborators, tackled the problem of tracking virus variants by using artificial intelligence (AI). The powerful Polaris supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), which is enabling science in the runup to the Aurora exascale system, enabled the research with help from Cerebras' AI-hardware accelerator and NVIDIA's GPU-accelerated Selene system. Polaris is equipped with GPUs and with workload orchestration by Altair® PBS Professional®. The project team won the ACM's prestigious 2022 Gordon Bell Special Prize for High Performance Computing-Based COVID-19 Research. The results the Argonne researchers and their collaborators have achieved paves the way for faster, more detailed insight into the virus mutation process, enabling scientists to act on emergent variants and develop ammunition to reduce severity and slow the spread, ultimately saving lives.

Everything in our world and beyond is made from a common set of materials — elements — that combine to become the diverse collection of matter all around us. When a star dies, going supernova in a spectacular explosion, it releases massive quantities of these elements. But how and why stars go supernova remains a mystery, and researchers from Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley are using supercomputers at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), including the powerful Polaris supercomputer, to enable 3D supernova simulation. Polaris is boosted by GPUs and equipped with workload orchestration by Altair® PBS Professional®, which automates job scheduling, management, monitoring, and reporting. Efficient workload management is critical for large, complex workloads like these. Enabled by powerful HPC, the researchers have created "the largest collection of sophisticated 3D supernova simulations ever performed."

Sandia National Laboratories' Michael Heroux, director of software technology for the Exascale Computing Project (ECP), discusses the DOE's roadmap to exascale and the focus area of ECP software technology.

To support its goal of accelerating the development cycle, early in 2020 NIAR commissioned a study to assess the scalability of Altair Radioss™, Altair’s structural analysis solver for highly non-linear problems under dynamic loadings. Regular support from an Altair engineer ensured swift familiarization with Radioss. The study was performed on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). OCI with its bare metal HPC shapes that use low latency RDMA interconnect provided highly scalable infrastructure-as-a-service (IAAS) for Radioss.