Researchers Win Gordon Bell Special Prize for Models that Track COVID Variants

Members of the GenSLMs team received the Gordon Bell Special Prize for HPC-Based COVID-19 Research at the SC22 conference. Scientists from Argonne National Laboratory and a team of collaborators have won the 2022 ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for High Performance Computing-Based COVID-19 Research for their method of quickly identifying how a virus evolves. Their work in training large language models (LLMs) to discover variants of SARS-CoV-2 has implications to biology beyond COVID-19. The researchers leveraged Argonne's supercomputing and AI resources to develop and apply LLMs toward tracking how a virus can mutate into more dangerous or more transmissible variants, or a variant of concern (VOC). Existing methods to track VOCs can be slow.