March 2021 ECSS SYMPOSIUM
March 16, 2021
HPC for epidemic modeling with limited data: COVID-19 case studies
Presenter(s): Kelly Pierce (TACC)
The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) emerged in late 2019 and spread globally in early 2020. Initial reports suggested the associated disease, COVID-19, produced rapid epidemic growth and caused high mortality. As the virus sparked local epidemics in new communities, health systems and policy makers were forced to make decisions with limited information about the spread of the disease. The UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium formed in response to the urgent need for increased situational awareness and developed a library of COVID-19 models to project infections and healthcare burdens. These models were used to inform policy decisions in the city of Austin, Texas and as part of the CDC COVID-19 mortality and infection model ensembles. Now one year into the pandemic, the Consortium has expanded the scope of its work to include estimates of infection introductions in schools, statistically informed guidelines for genomic surveillance to detect novel variants, and equitable vaccine distribution. As an early partner in the Consortium, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has provided support in software development, data management, and long-term modeling infrastructure development. This talk will overview the joint work of the Consortium and TACC, with an emphasis on the impact of limited data availability in epidemiological modeling and the role of high-performance computing in supporting fast turn-around of time-sensitive results.