Digital transformation of droplet/aerosol infection risk assessment realized on "Fugaku" for the fight against COVID-19. (November 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Ando, Kazuto; Bale, Rahul; Li, ChungGang; Matsuoka, Satoshi; Onishi, Keiji; Tsubokura, Makoto
• Is Part Of: International journal of high performance computing applications. Volume 36:Number 5/6(2022)
• Page Start: 568
• Page End: 586
• Publication Date: 2022-11
• Subjects: COVID-19 -- computational fluid dynamics -- building cube method -- immersed boundary method -- dirty CAD -- droplet/aerosol transmission -- societal behavioral change; High performance computing -- Periodicals; Supercomputers -- Periodicals; 004.1105
• DOI: 10.1177/10943420221116056
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1094-3420

Abstract

The fastest supercomputer in 2020, Fugaku, has not only achieved digital transformation of epidemiology in allowing end-to-end, detailed quantitative modeling of COVID-19 transmissions for the first time but also transformed the behavior of the entire Japanese public through its detailed analysis of transmission risks in multitudes of societal situations entailing heavy risks. A novel aerosol simulation methodology was synthesized out of a combination of a new CFD methods meeting industrial demands in the solver, CUBE (Jansson et al., 2019), which not only allowed the simulations to scale massively with high resolution required for micrometer virus-containing aerosol particles but also enabled extremely rapid time-to-solution due to its ability to generate the digital twins representing multitudes of societal situations in a matter of minutes, attaining true overall application high performance; such simulations have been running for the past 1.5°years on Fugaku, cumulatively consuming top supercomputer-class resources and the communicated by the media as well as becoming the basis for official public policies.