In March, Fermilab Chief Information Officer Liz Sexton-Kennedy got in touch with Frank Würthwein, executive director of the Open Science Grid, to find out whether Fermilab could work with the Open Science Grid to contribute computing power to COVID-19 research.
It turned out that Würthwein was thinking along similar lines.
“Then he really ran with it,” Sexton-Kennedy said.
Shortly thereafter, members of the Open Science Grid — a network of organizations that provides computing services for science research of all stripes — were contributing tens of thousands of core-hours to COVID-19 projects. That number quickly grew to more than a million core-hours.
As part of the unified response, scientists and engineers at the Department of Energy’s Fermilab spurred themselves into high gear, preparing computing clusters — sets of connected computers — as COVID-19-research machines.
As of April 27, Fermilab has contributed a total of 1.8 million core hours to the pandemic-fighting effort carried out by projects such as Folding@home, which is simulating how viral proteins fold to help scientists design better therapeutics. Brookhaven National Laboratory, another DOE national lab and OSG member, has contributed 2.9 million core hours.
As a member of the Open Science Grid, Fermilab is dedicating a number of computing clusters for COVID-19 research. Photo: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab
“Understanding how the COVID-19 virus proteins fold — it’s all electrochemistry. Basically, it’s physics in the end that they’re simulating,” Sexton-Kennedy said. Like particle physics, “it’s computationally complicated science that takes lots of computing resources to figure out.”
Both Fermilab and Brookhaven’s high-throughput computing capabilities have for over a decade met the needs of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, an enormous particle physics research facility in Europe, each analyzing data from billions of particle collisions.
During the times that select Fermilab and Brookhaven computers get a break from particle collision analysis, they’re free to crunch data outside particle physics. That’s where the Open Science Grid comes in. Among other tasks, the OSG evaluates research proposals to determine which are a good fit for its networks. In offering its resources to COVID-19 proposals, it provided the kind of vetting that the labs wouldn’t have been able to assume on their own. All the computational work is handled remotely.
Providing the world’s scientists with powerful computing capacity fuels research that would otherwise not be possible. Recognizing this, the U.S. Department of Energy supports Fermilab and Brookhaven science programs for the use and development of the OSG, and the National Science Foundation funds universities that partner with the OSG.
Brookhaven National Laboratory is contributing significant computing capacity to COVID-19 research through the Open Science Grid. Photo: Brookhaven National Laboratory
This effort is part of a larger COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium designed to provide access to the world’s most powerful high-performance computing resources in support of COVID-19 research. Consortium members include industrial partners, academic leaders, and agencies within the federal government, including the Department of Energy and many of its national laboratories. OSG prioritizes jobs to meet the needs of the consortium first.
“To maximize the chances that important COVID-19 research ideas reach us, we joined multiple national and international calls for computing requests: the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, a call with EGI for Advanced Computing Research in Europe, and the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid COVID-19 task force. We are also coordinating with all of the National Science Foundation software institutes,” said Würthwein, who is also a physics professor at the University of California, San Diego, and the lead for high-throughput computing at the university’s San Diego Supercomputer Center.
The computing power at Fermilab, Brookhaven and other OSG institutions can be used to model how virus proteins interact with receptors on cells in the human respiratory system. Simulations run on these systems can also sort through billions of potential drug molecules to narrow the search for drugs that might interfere with those interactions or disrupt the function of a virus protein in other ways.
Recent developments in machine learning accelerate this discovery process by improving the selection of leads. Modeling drug-protein interactions can be broken down into a larger number of independent calculations that can be farmed out to many computer cores. This characteristic makes the simulations well-suited to high-throughput capabilities at Fermilab, Brookhaven and the OSG infrastructure.
“This is a core competency that we can bring to the fight against this pandemic,” said Eric Lançon, director of Brookhaven’s Scientific Data and Computing Center and a member of the Open Science Grid executive team.
“I’m proud of our staff for being able to respond and think about what we can do usefully,” Sexton-Kennedy said. “We have had plans to create an institutional cluster for over a year, and the people involved got an extra bit of enthusiasm thinking that, ‘Hey, one of the first uses for this facility could be COVID research.'”
Learn more about how Open Science Grid is helping fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
This work is supported by the Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory are supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.
David Ibbett is Fermilab’s 2020 guest composer. Photo: Tom Nichol, Fermilab
In David Ibbett’s latest musical offering as Fermilab guest composer, soprano Beth Sterling sings of the subtle neutrino: “You should be massless … you should be changeless.” Yet experiments have shown that neutrinos have mass and continually change form as they move through time and space.
With “Particle of Doubt,” scored for soprano, violin, viola, cello, piano and electronics, Ibbett creates a plaintive ode to the neutrino’s mysteries.
A four-minute video of the performance as well as the composer’s commentary (which opens with a cameo by Ibbett’s new baby) is now available online. It is a trailer for a larger piece that is planned to premiere at Fermilab in 2021.
In his commentary, Ibbett explains why he was drawn to the ubiquitous and strange particles.
“They don’t quite fit,” Ibbett said. “They have mass, but they shouldn’t, according to the Standard Model, and this raises all sorts of questions and opportunities to take our physics understanding further.”
The video features scenes from an animation of the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab. The groundbreaking experiment is the inspiration for the lyrics.
“Particle of Doubt” features what Ibbett calls a “sonification” of neutrino oscillation, the phenomenon in which a neutrino morphs between its various types. He mapped the probability waves of neutrino transformation to the three string melodies.
With its modern musicality, “Particles of Doubt” underscores that neutrinos are neither massless nor changeless – nor voiceless.
“We’re thrilled to be working with David as Fermilab’s first guest composer,” said Janet MacKay-Galbraith, head of the Fermilab Arts and Lecture Series. “His musical creativity, intellectual curiosity and passion for physics perfectly express the synchronicities between the arts and science. We can’t wait to hear and see what he comes up with next in this year-long endeavor.”
This work is supported by Fermi Research Alliance LLC.
Fermilab is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.
Typically, Fermilab employee Keenan Newton spends his days managing Fermilab’s main content management platforms and his nights and weekends as a volunteer firefighter. Now he’s arranged his schedule to serve the Illinois Emergency Management Agency, volunteering his personal time to help people during the current pandemic and responding to hazardous situations while based at the State Emergency Operations Center in Springfield. He performs this work while continuing his full-time work as Fermilab Content Management Group lead.
Below is his account of what it’s like to serve the public as a part of the Situation Unit in the Illinois Incident Management Team.
Keenan Newton is on call at the Illinois State Emergency Operations Center. Photo: Rusty Tanton, Illinois Emergency State Agency
As a volunteer firefighter, I am very involved with public safety in my community. I get to learn many specialties such as hazardous materials technician work, rope operations and even instruction. One of the specialties I got involved in is incident management, specifically as a planning and situational unit leader. As I started to take FEMA classes for all-hazards incident management, I was invited to join a statewide volunteer team of incident managers, the Illinois Incident Management Team, which supports incident management duties at the county, state and national levels.
When the state of Illinois started activating resources to assist with managing the COVID-19 incident, it quickly found out that its internal resources were short since many individuals were already assisting at a more local level. As a result, the state reached out to the Illinois Incident Management Team to request help with planning, logistics and situation unit leader positions. I offered my assistance on the weekends, and I have been supporting the Situation Unit, which collects data from the various functional groups and summarizes it for the director of the Illinois Emergency Management Agency. The IEMA director then briefs the governor, who uses information from these briefings for his daily 2:30 p.m. public address.
This shows the main meeting room at the State Emergency Operations Center in Springfield, Illinois. Photo: LVD Architecture
Following Nigel Lockyer’s March 24 all-hands meeting, during which he said to bubble up any opportunities to assist in mitigating this pandemic, I requested the ability to work remotely from the State Emergency Operations Center in Springfield. Generally, the work is sporadic throughout the day, and since I just hang out in a hotel room in the evenings, I can work on lab tasks there while being close to the action in Springfield as needed. On average, I put in five hours of lab work during normal business hours and three additional hours in the evening, thus minimizing the impact to lab activities while I am assisting the SEOC.
One of my key accomplishments is to have introduced Microsoft Teams, a collaborative software tool, to the SEOC. The state had just procured the licenses but had not yet implemented Teams. Using this software has been a game changer for us in the Situation Unit — it condensed our daily process for compiling and submitting our daily report from three-and-a-half hours to only two-and-a-half hours. With the success of using Microsoft Teams within the Situation Unit, the SEOC management has decided to implement Microsoft Teams throughout the Illinois Emergency Management Agency to manage the entire COVID-19 pandemic response. My experience at the lab with both Teams and SharePoint has helped me to apply much of what I learned to streamline and improve the information flow at the SEOC and, ultimately, to the Illinois governor so he has the latest available information.
If, while spending more time at home, you develop a hankering for more particle physics in your life, look no further. You can learn all about the weird world of subatomic particles by browsing the information below.
Dive into the structure of the Standard Model. Expand your physics vocabulary. Create a sciency craft. Even take a tour of Fermilab — virtually!
Explainers, videos, public lectures, interactive webpages: There’s a ton to explore, so the next time you ask yourself, “How do you capture a neutrino?” you’ll be only a click away from the answer.
Enjoy!
Fermilab YouTube playlists
Want to jump into particle physics? Check out Fermilab’s plentiful menu of playlists and delve into the topic that tickles your fancy — quantum physics, cosmology, relativity and more.
This playlist tackles some of the most intriguing topics — from the size of our universe and the kinds of matter within it to tiny, mysterious particles and the experiments scientists build to study them.
Get a glimpse into the weird world of particle physics with this selection of popular lectures presented to the public at Fermilab.
Get started on our video series Subatomic Stories, hosted by Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln at home.
Science education activities for young people
Take a high school-level course on quantum computing.
Visit Science Snippets, our growing selection of activities for learning science at home.
Take a virtual visit to our Lederman Science Center and do a few science activities at home based on our exhibits, such as: Can you bend light? Can you build a LEGO accelerator? Can you play particle pinball?
Fermilab Arts and Lectures At Home
Connect to the popular Arts and Lecture Series online. Events are available for free with registration through the Arts and Lecture Series’ online ticketing.
All Things Neutrino
360 virtual tours
Take tours of Fermilab and some of its experiments: Wilson Hall, Muon g-2 experiment, Main Injector particle accelerator, NuMI/MINOS underground research area.
Go along on a walk through the NOvA neutrino experimental area.
Go inside a neutrino detector with the VENu app.
Highlights from Symmetry, a particle physics publication
Sign up for our Symmetry newsletter or follow us on social media.
Watch short, engaging videos in the Ask Symmetry video playlist.
Expand your physics lingo with physics vocabulary articles.
Check out the big ideas series.
Look inside the LHC.
A primer: Dark matter 101.
A primer: Neutrinos 101.
Meet some of the people who work on particle physics.
Treat yourself to some physics and art.
Do some quirky and crafty projects.
Symmetry’s top articles of 2019.
Read about particle physics in Latin America.
Meet a scientist or engineer
Get to know the people building the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.
Hear how these people became particle physicists.
Learn about the benefits of particle physics
Examples from medicine, homeland security, industry, computing, science and workforce development illustrate a long and growing list of beneficial practical applications with contributions from particle physics.
Particle Physics 101
What is particle physics? And what are the big questions that scientists hope to answer?
Get the latest Fermilab news and learn about particle physics through Fermilab social media. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
This work is supported by the Department of Energy Office of Science.
Fermilab is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.