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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / JUNE 30, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 26
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Special Features:
ORION GRID POSITIONS SHARCNET
AMONG WORLD'S FASTEST
An agreement announced recently with the Ontario Research and Innovation
Optical Network (ORION) helped the Shared Hierarchical Academic Research
Computing Network (SHARCNET) position itself among the world's fastest
supercomputers, by combining the power of SHARCNET's geographically
distributed sites to produce a computational infrastructure equivalent to
those of the top 50 computer installations in the world.
The agreement, announced at the SHARCNET Annual General Meeting in Guelph,
provides SHARCNET with a dedicated one-gigabit per second segment on the ORION
network, linking SHARCNET's three main computational sites at the University
of Western Ontario in London, the University of Guelph and McMaster University
in Hamilton.
ORION's high-speed connectivity gives the computational facilities at these
sites the combined processing power of over one Teraflop, or one trillion
"floating operations per second", an internationally-recognized measure of
processing power used by the Top500 Supercomputer Sites to track the world's
most powerful computer installations.
Although the world's top supercomputer rankings are constantly shifting,
SHARCNET's capacity would currently be ranked among the top 50 sites in the
world (November 2002) and would represent one of Canada's most powerful HPC
sites. SHARCNET is currently conducting benchmarking tests to establish its
official ranking for the Top500's bi-annual update in November 2003.
"This connection provides SHARCNET researchers with greater access to
distributed computational resources, more opportunities for collaboration
between institutions and the ability to undertake more
computationally-intensive research of benefit to Ontario," said Carmen
Gicante, SHARCNET's Executive Director.
"ORION was created to bring leading-edge network capability to Ontario's
publicly funded research and education community," explained Phil Baker,
president and CEO of ORANO, which owns and operates the ORION network. "This
partnership with SHARCNET is the first of many innovative initiatives that
ORION will now make possible throughout Ontario."
Distributed computing, a primary focus of SHARCNET, is based on the
principle
that applications requiring a large amount of computing power can be
distributed across available processors to optimize time and efficiency. For
example, if a SHARCNET researcher at McMaster required 64 processors to run a
certain application, and only 32 were available, the computation could be
distributed, via the ORION network, to available processors at Guelph and
Western.
ORION, among the largest and most powerful optical research networks in the
world, is a new 3,700-kilometre infrastructure that links Ontario's 43
post-secondary institutions and more than 50 publicly funded research
institutions and organizations through 21 network connection points throughout
Ontario.
The agreement provides SHARCNET with a dedicated connection over ORION to
enable collaborative research and facilitate access to computational resources
across SHARCNET partner institutions.
As part of this strategic partnership, SHARCNET and ORION will collaborate
to
provide the opportunity for researchers and staff within both organizations to
gain knowledge and experience in the testing, development and management of an
advanced optical-based R&D network.
Established in June 2001, the Shared Hierarchical Academic Research
Computing
Network (SHARCNET) is Canada's largest High Performance Computing (HPC)
research facility. SHARCNET is a consortium of five Southwestern Ontario
universities and two community colleges that provides HPC services, at no
cost, to the research community. Over 300 researchers currently use SHARCNET
resources.
SHARCNET's academic partners include The University of Western Ontario,
University of Guelph, McMaster University, University of Windsor, Wilfrid
Laurier University, Fanshawe College and Sheridan College. Support for
SHARCNET is provided by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), Ontario
Innovation Trust (OIT), and the Ontario Research and Development Challenge
Fund (ORDCF), as well as by corporate partners Hewlett Packard, Quadrics
Supercomputing World, Platform Computing, Bell Canada and Nortel Networks.
Owned and operated by the Optical Regional Advanced Network of Ontario
(ORANO), a not-for-profit organization, the Ontario Research and Innovation
Optical Network (ORION) is one of the largest fully owned and operated optical
research and education networks in the world, providing affordable high-speed
access and connectivity to Ontario's research and advanced education (R&E)
institutions.
The Ontario Ministry of Enterprise, Opportunity and Innovation and
Ontario's
SuperBuild Corporation are ORION's primary funding partner, with an investment
of $32.3 million. The federal government has invested $3.4 million through
CANARIE, Canada's Advanced Internet Development Organization, which operates
CA*net4. Additional private and public sector investments over the next three
years will bring the value of the ORION project to over $78 million.
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