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Thanks to an investment from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the Ontario government, confirmed this week, the Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing Network (or SHARCNET), will be soon be among the world's most powerful High Performance Computing (HPC) centers. HPC, also called supercomputing, allows scientists to employ extremely powerful computers to accelerate the pace of their research in a cost-effective virtual environment and in many cases, to tackle complex scientific problems that could not otherwise be studied. SHARCNET supports the research of some of Canada's preeminent academics, from strategies to combat Foot and Mouth and Mad Cow disease to new models to manage financial risk, by providing state-of-the-art HPC facilities; facilities that are hundreds or thousands of times faster than a regular desktop computer. Put in perspective, a Canadian researcher using SHARCNET can produce results that would have normally taken a year or more on a personal computer in a single day. The total investment in this phase of SHARCNET is $50M: $19.3M from the CFI, $19.3M in matching funds from the Ontario government and an additional $10M from SHARCNET's institutional and private sector partners. SHARCNET's 11 partners comprise more than 50% of Ontario's research faculty. "This unprecedented investment clearly illustrates the importance of SHARCNET resources and services to the provincial and national research community," says Carmen Gicante, SHARCNET Executive Director. "SHARCNET is positioned to help both the province and the country become global leaders in research and innovation." It is anticipated that once fully installed, the SHARCNET systems, housed at 11 leading academic institutions in Ontario, will be the most powerful in Canada and that SHARCNET will have at least one system within the top 70 in the world (according Top500.org supercomputers list). In addition, SHARCNET will have data storage facilities that are the equivalent of tens of thousands of today's top-of-the-line personal computers and provide facilities that can visualize enormous sets of data, like the formation of stars and planets. It will also include affiliations with some of the province's leading research centres, including the Robarts Research Institute, Perimeter Institute, and Fields Institute. "In just under 4 years of operation, SHARCNET has attracted a world-leading academic community," states SHARCNET Scientific Director Hugh Couchman. "In this next evolution, SHARCNET will provide researchers with HPC facilities that are second to none in Canada and accelerate the production of results which are of benefit to our economy, health, environment, scientific knowledge and culture." The expansion is expected to support breakthroughs in such areas as human genomics, environmental protection, financial risk management, the containment of infectious human and animal diseases, and the development nano-scale electronic devices. "SHARCNET is a key driver in the attraction of many international researchers, including myself, to Canada," confirms Dr. Hermann Eberl, a University of Guelph Professor of Mathematics and SHARCNET Chair in Bio-computing who was attracted to Guelph because of SHARCNET facilities. "The technology and support services they provide enable scientific investigations that would otherwise be extremely difficult, even impossible in some cases." Dr. Eberl joined the Ontario research community in 2003 from the German National Research Center for Environment and Health. Using High Performance Computing, he studies microbial bio-processes that play a role in areas such as biological wastewater purification, the treatment of bacterial infections with antibiotics, and food safety.