Wednesday, November 21, 2001

Canadian Supercomputing Network Brings Together 7 University Computer Clusters By KAREN BIRCHARD A supercomputing network involving seven colleges and universities in Ontario -- and representing more than a quarter of the supercomputing power available in Canada -- officially came online Friday. It's designed to handle a range of complex problems facing researchers in science, medicine, business, engineering, and the social sciences. "It will enable researchers to conduct their work in Canada, rather than going to the United States or abroad, and will also allow us to attract researchers from all over the world," said Paul Davenport, president of the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario. The Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing Network, or SHARCNET, is based at the University of Western Ontario, home of the network's fastest cluster, known as "Greatwhite." On its own, Greatwhite is the fastest computer-cluster system available for university researchers in Canada. The cluster uses linked, off-the-shelf processors and software instead of a name-brand single-unit supercomputer. Other primary clusters in SHARCNET are at the University of Guelph (whose cluster is named "Hammerhead"), and McMaster University ("Idris"). Smaller clusters are located at Fanshawe College, Sheridan College, Wilfrid Laurier University, and the University of Windsor. The project began more than two years ago. "Right from the beginning, we designed SHARCNET to be quite flexible," said Allan MacIsaac, one of the directors. "So in some sense it is all things to all people. It's quite thrilling to walk around and see how widely it's being used ... especially by people who only had had what their desktops could provide." SHARCNET will allow researchers to describe and predict the behavior of complex systems over widely varying scales of length and time. Its uses include cancer-treatment research and the design of fuel-efficient aircraft wings, as well as studies of quantum gravity, human genomics, and insurance modelling. Using the network is a way for research to move ahead by creating computational grids, and is also "a basis for e-science," said Mike Bauer, SHARCNET's principal investigator. The $26.4-million project is jointly financed by the academic institutions, the Canadian and Ontario governments, and interested businesses. SHARCNET's power is greater than that of supercomputers at some well known research institutions, including the California Institute of Technology, Cornell University, Princeton University, and the University of Cambridge, according a list of the most powerful supercomputers released last week by the Task Force on Cluster Computing of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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