Abstract
The COVID pandemic has changed all of our lives and continues to do so. In the first months of 2020, research teams around the world focussed their attention on how their computational knowledge could be put to use to support efforts to tackle the disease. The resulting projects ranged from the most detailed molecular simulations of a virus ever performed to multivariate data analysis using the wealth of patient data and the latest data analytics techniques. In recognition of the way advanced computing was contributing to the fight against COVID, Gordon Bell, a pioneer in high-performance and parallel computing, endowed the ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for HPC-Based COVID-19 Research in 2020. Following the high quality of submissions in 2020, he continued the prize for 2021 and 2022. The prizes recognise outstanding research achievement toward the understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic through the use of high-performance computing.
In 2021, six papers were selected by the Gordon Bell Prize Committee as finalists for the award. This special issue presents three of these papers following the first special issue which presented the other three. Nominations were selected based on performance and innovation in their computational methods, in addition to their contributions towards understanding the nature, spread and/or treatment of the disease. The committee evaluated each of the nominations on the basis of the following considerations: • Evidence of important algorithmic and/or implementation innovations • Clear improvement over the previous state-of-the-art • Performance is not dependent on an architecture that is specialised or cannot be replicated • Detailed performance measurements are provided that demonstrate the claims of scalability (strong as well as weak scaling), time to solution and efficiency in using bottleneck resources (such as memory size or bandwidth, communications bandwidth, I/O), as well as peak performance • That the achievement is generalisable, in the sense that other scientists can learn and benefit from the innovations
The committee commended all of the finalist papers for their quality and breadth of approaches to the challenges posed by the pandemic. The winning paper, entitled ‘Digital transformation of droplet/aerosol infection risk assessment realised on “Fugaku” for the fight against COVID-19’, was submitted by a team from the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Japan. The team took experience of an existing industrial modelling code and, using an ensemble approach, used the power of the Fugaku supercomputer, to understand droplet and aerosol spread from people with COVID-19. What particularly impressed the committee was that this work changed public behaviour in Japan, and internationally, in the early stages of the pandemic. This paper was presented in the first special issue.
The three finalist papers presented in this special issue are ‘Data-Driven Scalable Pipeline using National Agent-Based Models for Real-time Pandemic Response and Decision Support’ by a team from the University of Virginia, ‘#COVIDisAirborne: AI-Enabled Multiscale Computational Microscopy of Delta SARS-CoV-2 in a Respiratory Aerosol’ by a team of 16 organisations led by the University of California San Diego and ‘FEP-based large-scale virtual screening for effective drug discovery against COVID-19’ by a team of eight organisations led by Sun Yat-Sen University.
We hope you enjoy reading these papers as much as the committee enjoyed selecting them.
Professor Mark Parsons
ACM Gordon Bell Prize Chair 2021