This extract is from a DRAFT article being prepared for the CERN bulletin.

Authors: Melissa.Gaillard@cern.ch, James.Gillies@cern.ch

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As a first response to the pandemic, the particle physics’ community mobilised its number crunching’s capabilities, allocating processors from the CERN, the LHC experiments, and the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid’s data centres to support volunteer-computing initiatives such as Rosetta@home and Folding@home that simulate protein dynamics to help in the fight against COVID-19. With the pandemic worsening, those distributed computing projects rapidly grew in terms of participants and were able to combine a processing capacity exceeding several exaFLOPS, a first in the world.  For CERN and the particle physics’community, it was time by then to switch from dedicating computer cores to contributing to those initiatives in more specific ways, through data management and data analytics’ expertise as well as software resources.

Open source technologies which are key to particle physics’ data management, are also particularly well suited for optimising the transfer and management of the COVID-19 research data. Examples are FTS, the File Transfer System developed by CERN,and Rucio, the scientific data management system initially developed by and for the LHC ATLAS experiment and now adopted by many scientific communities. Developments to adapt them to the Folding@home needs have been successfully completed. Folding@home, in their recently published paper, thanked CERN and the particle physics community, for thiscollaboration on data management. 

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