Xipe Totec

Xipe Totec's Journal

March 28, 2020

LOL! My wife is picking up my my word-play. Just named Trump King Mierdas

Like King Midas, but he turns everything to shit (mierda).

March 25, 2020

What you need to know about shelter in place rules and curfews for Valley counties (South Texas)

EDINBURG, Texas (CBS 4) — Major changes have been taking place across the Rio Grande Valley to stop the spread of COVID-19.

The biggest change as of Tuesday, takes place in Cameron County. Judge Eddie Trevino Jr. has mandated a shelter in place order starting Wednesday until April 8, 2020 at 11:59 p.m.

"I'd rather be criticized for getting ahead of this too early, then for getting behind this," said the Cameron County Judge.

This means you should only be on the streets for essential travel.

"You will be allowed to go to the supermarket and get supplies, you need to sustain your family, consumables, if you need to get to the doctor, hospital and pharmacy that will continue," said Trevino.

...

If you break any of these violations, you will be fined $1,000 and can face up to 180 days in jail.

https://valleycentral.com/news/local/what-you-need-to-know-about-shelter-in-place-rules-and-curfews-for-rgv-counties

March 22, 2020

The Fastest Supercomputer on Earth Is Being Deployed Against Coronavirus

The US Department of Energy has announced that the Summit supercomputer will be used to attempt to find a treatment or cure for Covid-19, also known as coronavirus. Summit is a 10KW machine built with 4,608 processing nodes. Each node contains 2x Power9 CPUs at 3.07GHz and six Nvidia Volta V100 GPUs. It’s the fastest supercomputer on Earth, with a demonstrated performance of 148.6 petaFLOPS in Linpack and peak performance of over 200 petaFLOPS.

The reason the DoE is tapping the world’s fastest supercomputer for the project is that trying to find methods of inhibiting or attacking a virus is a computationally taxing problem. IBM writes:

When trying to understand new biological compounds, like viruses, researchers in wet labs grow the micro-organism and see how it reacts in real-life to the introduction of new compounds, but this can be a slow process without computers that can perform digital simulations to narrow down the range of potential variables, but even then there are challenges. Computer simulations can examine how different variables react with different viruses, but when each of these individual variables can be comprised of millions or even billions of unique pieces of data and compounded with the need to be run multiple simulations, this can quickly become a very time-intensive process using commodity hardware.

https://medium.com/extremetech-access/the-fastest-supercomputer-on-earth-is-being-deployed-against-coronavirus-1b61d25a8e55

The video below summarizes the work scientists have done using Summit. Thanks to the supercomputer, researchers screened 8,000 compounds in a matter of days and identified 77 potentially beneficial small-molecule compounds that show evidence of inhibiting Covid-19.