How Supercomputing and Advanced X-Rays Helped the Government Fight COVID-19 Timofeev Vladimir/Shutterstock.com
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Government-backed scientists spent countless hours in 2020 applying advanced research and sophisticated technological capabilities to help the United States better grasp and effectively fight COVID-19.
Much of their efforts built on prior work that started unfolding long before the pandemic even posed a threat, but modern, real-world impacts hastened by the global emergency are now beginning to come to light.
For instance, genetic mutations within and helping strengthen five potential vaccines including those developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna hinged upon more than a decade of research advanced by the Energy Department’s Advanced Photon Source, or APS.
Army Research Lab Announces Acquisition of Two New Supercomputers Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock
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Two new supercomputers are set to join the Defense Department’s stock of sophisticated machines.
The Army Research Laboratory, which houses the Pentagon’s Supercomputing Resource Center, announced the fresh acquisition this week. Among other systems, the new and advanced computers will push the center towards establishing a cumulative capability of more than 23 petaflops of performance.
Defense officials anticipate the supercomputers will enter production service in “the mid-fiscal 2021 timeframe,” the lab’s announcement notes.
The systems are named Jean and Kay, as an homage to Jean Jennings Bartik and Kathleen “Kay” McNulty Mauchly, who are considered by Defense to be “computing pioneers as part of the original team of programmers of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer,” or what the release called the world’s first general pu
Dec 16, 2020
With the volume, variety, velocity and complexity of data threatening to overmatch systems sifting through ever increasing amounts of data, intelligence and defense agencies are looking for new approaches to solving data-intensive problems.
Currently, data the intelligence community focuses on is increasingly sparse, random and heterogeneous, creating data-intensive problems that today’s computers were not designed to solve, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) said in a Dec. 11 broad agency announcement.
IARPA’s Advanced Graphic Intelligence Logical Computing Environment (AGILE) program seeks to transform “massive, random, heterogeneous data streams and structures into actionable knowledge.“ That task will require “system-level intelligent mechanisms for moving, accessing and storing large, random, time-varying data streams and structures that allow for the scalable and efficient execution of dynamic graph analytics workflows,” the
With current computer systems struggling to keep pace with ever more complex workloads, intelligence and defense agencies are looking for new approaches.