Sherlock is hard at work against COVID-19

About a month ago, we announced that we were dedicating a portion of Sherlock’s computing resources to research projects around COVID-19.

Since then, more than 15 PIs and research groups have reached out to share their projects, and their time-critical need for more computing resources in the global pandemic context. All of these projects have been granted access to Sherlock’s dedicated COVID-19 resources, and those research teams have been hard at work ever since.

As with pretty much everything that runs on Sherlock, it’s been amazing to see the breadth and variety of those research projects. They touch an stunningly wide variety of subjects, covering many of the biological, social and economic aspects of this disease.

From exploring CRISPR-based treatments, analyzing the SARS-CoV-2 genome and the virus-host interactions, to modeling the COVID-19 epidemiological spread in different locations, studying cellphone location data to understand contact patterns, improving statistical models of the spread and helping policy makers to take informed decisions, to modelling alternative ventilator designs, the research projects that now benefit from dedicated resources on Sherlock come from many of the Stanford Schools, from Medicine and Engineering to Humanities and Sciences.

To continue supporting this vast and collaborative endeavor, we’d like to renew our call and encourage more of our user community working on COVID-19 to reach out if they need more resources. With the generous contributions of the School of Humanities and Sciences, we’ve even been able to increase the amount of computing power dedicated to those critical projects.

Again, Sherlock owners: if you have dedicated compute nodes on Sherlock that you’d like to contribute to this essential computing effort, please let us know, and we’ll be happy to add them to the dedicated resources pool, so all of these projects around coronavirus could benefit from more computing power.

And if your lab is not doing COVID-19 research, don’t worry. Our primary mission is still to support research at Stanford, and research continues. So if you need assistance with computation or data challenges while your lab is closed, please feel free to fill out this short survey and we’ll try our best to help.