Scientific American
The U.S. Needs a National Strategic Computing Reserve
One year after supercomputers worked together to fight COVID, it’s time to broaden the partnership to prepare for other crises
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Last spring, as the world was coming to grips with the frightening scale and contagion of the COVID pandemic, scientists started to make rapid progress in understanding the disease. For many discoveries, progress was aided by world-class supercomputers and data systems, and research results advanced with unprecedented efficiency from understanding the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to modeling its spread, from therapeutics to vaccines, from medical response to managing the virus’s impacts.