SYSTEMS
Sun Microsystems is a key partner in HPCVL
Canada's most powerful high performance secure computing facility, based at Queen's University, will become even more powerful thanks to new funding from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation. 
HPCVL (High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory), a consortium of five universities and two colleges, has been awarded $11.5 million to support up to 1,600 researchers over the next five years. The investment comes from the $550-million Ontario Research Fund. This brings the total investment by the provincial government in HPCVL up to $39.2 million.
"This grant will enable HPCVL to provide researchers with the support and high performance computing resources they need to be major players in a highly competitive global research and innovation environment," says HPCVL executive director Ken Edgecombe. "Researchers using our facilities include economists, engineers, biologists, psychologists, chemists, and physicists doing groundbreaking work that ranges from identifying properties of neutrinos, to analyzing clinical data, to modeling drug delivery mechanisms." In announcing the new funding today on behalf of Premier and Minister of Research and Innovation Dalton McGuinty, Kingston MPP John Gerretsen said, "By providing more support for researchers, we are investing in one of Ontario's greatest assets - the skills and knowledge of our dynamic academic community." As well as Queen's, the other institutions in HPCVL are: Royal Military College, the University of Ottawa, Carleton University, Loyalist College, Ryerson University and Seneca College. Partner institutions house the computer clusters and run the network, which provides high-performance computing resources to researchers across Canada. The network has been designed, built and is run in a secure virtual manner. It provides high-speed computations for researchers in a number of fields requiring intricate mathematical calculations and analysis that would take years to perform on even the most sophisticated desktop computer. Using HPCVL, researchers can get data and analysis in weeks, days or hours. Sun Microsystems is a key partner in HPCVL, and as of 2006, the Queen's-based facility is the largest Sun Microsystems installation of its kind in the world.
