ACADEMIA

Four new supercomputing clusters will give SHARCNET the ability to increase its network capacity from 1,000 to 6,000 processors. Established in January 2001, SHARCNET (Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing Network) is structured as a "cluster of clusters" across south-central Ontario to meet the computational needs of researchers and to facilitate the development of leading-edge tools for high-performance computing grids. The $20 million upgrade from HP Canada will enable SHARCNET, which includes Western as the leader of the 11 Ontario academic institutions involved, to meet the rapidly growing high-performance computing (HPC) demands and advance research progress for a diverse Canadian research community, and help realize the vision of establishing a world-leading computational grid. Western is also joined by the University of Guelph, McMaster University, Wilfrid Laurier University, the University of Windsor, Fanshawe College and Sheridan College. This HPC infrastructure expansion is enabling four additional Canadian institutions to join the research community, including the universities of Waterloo, Brock and York, and the Ontario Institute of Technology. Hugh Couchman, Scientific Director of SHARCNET, says such technology is critical to Canada's competitiveness as a world-class research community and will accelerate the production of results that are of benefit to our economy, health, environment, scientific knowledge and culture. "Our researchers will be able to use as much, or as little, of the processing and data capacity as they require, and seamlessly access it from anywhere on the network," says Couchman. Once fully installed in early fall, the cluster expansion is expected to assist SHARCNET in accelerating breakthroughs in such areas as human genomics, the containment of infectious human and animal diseases, improving weather prediction, simulating the collapse and formation of planets, and the development of nano-scale electronic devices. The HP Cluster Platform systems, to be housed at SHARCNET academic institutions, will combine to be the most powerful supercomputer in Canada and achieve ranking on the Top500 supercomputers list.