May 12, 2020

Department members Bill Schneider, Paul Pickard, John Doroshenko, and Jak Chakhalian are running 3D printers around the clock to produce protective face shields to be distributed to those on the front lines of the battle against COVID-19. 

 

Along similar lines, Jerrell Spotwood has gathered our overstock of critical supplies such as face shields, goggles, gloves and swabs, and arranged for them to be distributed as needed to RU hospitals.

 

In addition to our efforts at 3D printing PPE, Pieter Jacques reports that the HEX group's computer farm is now contributing computing capacity to researchers from around the U.S. who are investigating COVID-19 protein folding.  This is being done through the facilities of the Open Science Grid (OSG), with which the HEX group's farm has been associated for many years.

So far over 20,000 cour-hours of CPU time have been used to run jobs submitted to the OSG by those researchers.  Thanks go to HEX graduate student Steven Clark for bringing to our attention the protein folding project.