Covid, with Enea supercomputer over 450 thousand hours of calculation to counter the pandemic

Over 450,000 hours of calculation and 3,600 numerical simulations for analysis and measures to combat the pandemic with the aim of identifying molecules for new drugs against the Sars-CoV-2 virus, studying their spread in closed environments and creating physical barriers against contagion. In the year of the fight against Covid-19, this was one of the main activities carried out by Cresco6, the Enea supercomputer in second place in Italy for computing capacity in the field of public research. According to the report “Enea Cresco in the fight against Covid-19” – edited by the Enea Division of Development of IT and ICT systems and released today – Cresco6 was used 30% in collaboration with external research institutions on anti-Covid-19 front for a value of calculation hours equivalent to about 600 thousand euros. 70% of the resources were instead committed to the environmental and energy fields, for the development of forecast models on climate change and atmospheric pollution, the study of new materials for the production and storage of renewable energy sources, simulations for the safety of critical infrastructures, biotechnology, computational chemistry, fluid dynamics for the aerospace sector and development of codes for nuclear fusion. Cresco6 of the Enea Research Center in Portici, in the province of Naples, entered 420th place in 2018 in the prestigious Top500 of the most powerful computing infrastructures in the world, thanks to the doubling of the power reached 1.4 million billion of mathematical operations at second (1.4 PetaFlops).