For the better part of a year now, finding a way to end the coronavirus pandemic has required a global response and the efforts of thousands of people across scientific, medical, academic, and political entities. Among the collaborators are scientists working at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, who are contributing to these goals through research partnerships that are leveraging the superfacility model for real-time data analysis.
“We had been developing large-scale computing projects through the ExaFEL project, and when we went into the COVID-19 shutdown last year, LCLS management decided to invest additional resources into COVID-19 research and we got extra funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to accelerate that and get our users ready to do this work remotely,” said Chuck Yoon, an information systems specialist who leads the LCLS Data Analytics Department and the Advanced Methods for Analysis Group at SLAC.