In “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams, the haughty supercomputer Deep Thought is asked whether he can find the answer to the ultimate question concerning life, the universe and everything. He replies that, yes, he can do it, but it’s tricky and he’ll have to think about it. When asked how long it will take him he replies, “Seven-and-a-half million years. I told you I’d have to think about it.”
Real-life supercomputers are being asked somewhat less expansive questions but tricky ones nonetheless: how to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. They’re being used in many facets of responding to the disease, including to predict the spread of the virus, to optimize contact tracing, to allocate resources and provide decisions for physicians, to design vaccines and rapid testing tools and to understand sneezes. And the answers are needed in a rather shorter time frame than Deep Thought was proposing.
Jeremy Smith, Governor’s Chair for Molecular Biophysics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and director of the Center for Molecular Biophysics at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, recently shared how scientists are using supercomputers to fight COVID-19 in an article for The Conversation.
Read the full article on The Conversation’s website.
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CONTACT:
Lindsey Owen (865-974-6375, lowen8@utk.edu)