INDUSTRY

University of Toronto researchers and researchers across Canada will benefit from a major investment in high performance computing announced yesterday at the University by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). The agencies announced a total of $88 million in funding for seven supercomputing facilities that will co-operate to form a pan-Canadian network set to revolutionize the way research is conducted. High-performance computing allows for the speedy manipulation of data and the storage of large datasets, facilitating research that would otherwise be impossible. Applications are almost unlimited and include aerospace design, genomic modelling and weather forecasting. High-performance computing facilities offer researchers 66,000 times more memory than is available on conventional personal computers and 100,000 times more storage. The CFI awarded $60 million for high performance computing infrastructure and $18 million to assist with operating and maintenance costs. NSERC will contribute a further $10 million to help fund operating costs. The announcement was at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy by Eliot Phillipson, president and chief executive officer of the CFI, and Isabelle Blain, vice-president of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada. Peter Van Loan, Canada’s Minister of Intergovernmental Relations and Minister for Sport also attended. U of T’s connection to the funding is through SciNet, which will be a high performance computing facility for researchers from the university and its affiliated hospitals — though as part of a national sharing agreement governing the funding, its resources will be made available to researchers from across Canada. SciNet will receive $15 million for infrastructure and $4.5 million for operating costs. A request for $15 million in infrastructure matching funds is being reviewed by the provincial government. University of Toronto (U of T) has also committed funds and will build a facility to house the new infrastructure, which is expected to be in place by the end of 2007. “My field is climate simulation,” said U of T physics Professor Dick Peltier, who was instrumental in drafting the proposal to the CFI. “I conduct large-scale computational simulations of the interaction between the response of the atmosphere, ocean, sea ice, land surfaces and biosphere to global warming. The size and complexity of problems that we can manage is increased with high-performance computing because we will be able to do much more accurate simulations and do them at much higher spatial and temporal resolutions.” “We are very proud to be a member of what can only be called a very bold and new national network,” said Judith Wolfson, U of T’s vice-president (external relations). “This investment will indeed have an impact across many research disciplines—health, engineering, natural sciences, social sciences and human sciences. Very few research investments have such a broad impact,” she said at the event, noting that the funding will support more than 6,000 researchers at 61 universities. The investment is intended to strengthen Canada’s international competitiveness, as high- performance computing is becoming ever more important to the advancement of scientific research. “We recognize that Canada’s universities are global leaders in research and we are committed to seeing that continue,” said Van Loan, speaking on behalf of the federal government. “Research at Canada’s universities helps to drive our economy and improve our lives. In this era of increasing global competitiveness we must ensure that Canada’s universities have the resources that they need to continue this valuable contribution to society.” Peltier agrees. “In the absence of direct access to these machines, we have to beg, borrow or steal time on machines that are owned by others. Oftentimes we don’t get nearly the credit we would like to get for our work, because we have to share credit in order to get time.”