Weather by means of services, innovative platforms or connectivity, RNP keeps doubling its efforts to make the difference, supporting the user organizations in the initiatives to combat the new coronavirus. With 10 Gbps optical fiber links, the infrastructure offered by RNP and by the metropolitan network RedeRio/FAPERJ enables the  HEPGrid Laboratory (High Energy Physics Grid), of the Physics Institute of Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (Uerj), to be a part of a selected global group of institutions dedicated to face the pandemic by sharing a global network of high performance computer services aimed at different knowledge areas and supported by the Open Science Grid (OSG) project.

In Brazil, only Uerj and Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho (Unesp) participate of this international cooperation network, directly contributing to leverage the studies about Covid-19.

“The speed of the network provided by RNP and RedeRio-FAPERJ continues one of the fundamental elements to enable our participation in initiatives of the international scientific community. By means of this high-speed connection, our collaboration to the development of researches in the Nuclear Physics and High Energies areas becomes feasible, benefiting professors, researchers and students from the experimental group CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) of LHC (Large Hadron Collider) of Cern – at Uerj, in addition to many other knowledge areas that could use this combination of efforts for the maintenance of the connectivity, as well as the computer infrastructure, to carry out their researches in computing, chemistry, astronomy, etc.”, the technical coordinator of HEPGrid Eduardo Revoredo explains.

More than 58 thousand hours of data processing

Since the 5/6, the HEPGrid project started sharing its processing cores to collaborate to research projects worldwide directed to research about the pandemic provoked by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Until now, the laboratory has contributed with more than 58 thousand hours of data processing.

The main projects dedicated to pandemic researches, which use computer resources are: COVID19_FoldingAtHome, COVID19_Stanford_Das, COVID19_WeNMR, and COVID19_UCSD_Hsiao.

Technological demonstration in SC19

Last year, RNP contributed to activate 10 Gbps access to HEPGrid, for it to participate in the demonstration of technological transmission of big volumes of data in the SC19 event.

“The mission of RPN is to promote innovative use of advanced networks, the results obtained by HEPGrid prove that we are on the right way, making the participation of scientific groups in this action to combat the pandemic feasible. In addition to its mission in the physics area, HEPGrid participated in a global network of important action for the time we are living; this is the satisfying materialization of these years of partnership”, Alex Moura, Science Engagement specialist of RNP, tells.