COVID-19: Teratec members mobilize to overcome the crisis

HPC/HPDA, and more generally information technologies, have become fundamental in our Society for the Economy as well as for Health, but their role will be strengthened further in the coming months. Indeed, the crisis caused by the Coronavirus has dramatically affected our fellow citizens, and will most likely cause a second one of economic global impact almost without precedent. The HPC/HPDA already appears to be an excellent means to put in place the required processes anticipating such major crises. It also provides opportunities to restart the Economy "acting different from before", in particular by making it possible to repatriate the production of many products that our old Continent had ceased to manufacture.

This dramatic period has been an opportunity for Teratec and its members to mobilize and enable all those in need to develop new uses while strengthening the use of HPC-HPDA.

Teratec has been asked both by the French government and the European Commission to contribute to the fight against the serious health crisis we are going through, which led us to lay first foundations for large-scale Simulation dedicated to Health.

Beyond this key contribution, many TERATEC members mobilized to help companies and individuals overcome the crisis by taking initiatives to propose innovative, concrete and operational solutions, to make them available to all.

In this Newsletter, I invite you to find all proposals made by the members of our Association, such contributions being recorded in chronological order of reception. These are positive actions without a doubt, more likely to become of daily working practice in the "post-crisis" world.

In a future Newsletter, we will outline all various initiatives Teratec has had the opportunity to undertake over the last two months upon request of Public Authorities and the European Commission.

Daniel Verwaerde,
Président de Teratec

In order to support customers facing change in work processes impelled by the Pandemic, Distributor UCit for NICE solutions and tools - DCV (Remote Visualization Protocol) and EnginFrame (HPC Web Portal) - proposes free incremental DCV licenses of 90 days covering one hour of free Hotline, free demos for your new users, DCV “Fast Handling” training for administrators.

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The Jean Zay supercomputer (16 PFlop /s) designed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and acquired by GENCI to become operated within IDRIS since January 2020, has been made available to a coordinated international team led by Pr Jean-Philippe Piquemal to simulate and target the functional proteins of the virus, in order to help design new drugs capable of neutralizing it.

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The leading HPC Solution provider is mobilizing on several fronts. It provides healthcare professionals with its EpiSYS epidemic management tool, to process patient and virus data in real-time. Pooling its supercomputers to simulate the spread of the Pandemic and develop new treatments, it offers secure telework solutions for its customers to continue their activities.

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Since April 2020, GENCI has made its Joliot-Curie supercomputer (22 PFlop /s) available to European scientific teams, housed in the CEA's Very Large Computing Center (TGCC). As part of the PRACE call for projects Fast Track COVID-19, four first research projects with various objectives are being carried out on Joliot-Curie, for a total allocation of 99 million hours.

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Beyond its customer support services to ease remote working and to help them in their initiatives to fight against the Pandemic, the editor puts online lighting simulations to showcase the modes of propagation. These also stress the usefulness of wearing masks and respecting safety distances in usual or sporting activities, as well as the contributions of simulation in the design of more efficient medical equipment.

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The acceleration solution provider offers 90-day free access to its Clara Parabricks Pipelines software suite. Based on the Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK) from the Broad Institute, as the industrial benchmark for the identification of Single-nucleotide Polymorphysm (SNP) and DNA comparisons, it reduces genomics analysis times by a factor of up to 50 thanks to GPU acceleration.

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When it becomes crucial to continue to develop new products and services to sustain economic activity, the two specialists in the use of Cloud resources for HPC and digital simulation, join their resources to help companies pursue their R&D activities from light workstations. They offer you to discover it via access credits on their platforms.

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Based on the BullSequana platform from Atos, two of the most powerful supercomputers in France, Joliot-Curie (22 PFlop /s) from GENCI operated at the TGCC of CEA, and Occigen (3.5 PFlop /s) from National Computing Center of the CPU (CINES) have been providing priority access to a large part of their computing resources for a few weeks, benefiting European research teams carrying out epidemiological studies on COVID-19.

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The specialist in digital simulation and virtual prototyping for industry is participating in the Folding@Home consortium in the United States, in order to accelerate the search for treatments against the COVID-19 epidemic. To this end, it provides the Folding@Home network with its high-performance computing capacities and the graphical computing power of its servers. This consortium has a gross computing power of 470 PFlop /s.

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At a time when teleworking is essential to ensure the continuation of activities, cybersecurity is a real challenge for businesses. To meet this challenge, IBM Security makes available to you some of its essential technologies such as IBM MaaS360 with Watson and IBM Cloud Identity - 90 days for free - and informs you about the main threats while sharing best workforce management practices in teleworking.

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Piloting the StopCovid Project Team developing the mobile application for contact tracing in the context of the Pandemic, INRIA has just started publishing of Source Code and related documentation, enabling further collaborative development of this application. The project provides for analysis and potential integration of code improvements submitted by the developer community, as well as regular update publication.

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Given the circumstances due to the COVID-19 Pandemic spreading around the globe and uncertainty about the end of this health crisis, as well as decisions made by governments of countries from which exhibitors, speakers and participants are coming, we have decided to reschedule Forum Teratec 2020 (originally set for June 16-17) to next fall, October 13-14, 2020.

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