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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Applications:
CANADIAN UNIVERSITY DEPLOYS CROSS-DISCIPLINARY GRID
The University of New Brunswick's (Canada) new $1.3 million supercomputing
facility, consisting of a 164-processor cluster and a 2,800GB storage array
running Sun's Grid Engine software on Red Hat, will be used to power projects
in various fields, from engineering to the humanities.
The school got its funding for the system from the Canadian Foundation for
Innovation and the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency. The system was
necessary to launch a node of Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPOR), a CFI
initiative. The school must store and archive large amounts, ideally 1TB, of
text, video and images as a requirement for TAPOR.
The goal of TAPOR is to find language-use patterns to prepare dictionaries,
and to compare the genus of works and the styles of authors. UNB will also use
the Grid cluster to run experiments in areas like aerodynamics, computational
fluid dynamics and marine hydrodynamics, among others, for the department of
mechanical engineering, and to run a poetry database that will collect verse
from across the country.
However, TAPOR and the mechanical engineering projects will take precedence,
with other projects getting access to resources when the main two are not
using them.
UNB is a prime example of a Canadian institution using Grid technology to
efficiently allocate resources. Now, even departments with smaller budgets
that cannot afford to deploy a Grid can simply contribute to the existing
resource.
This cross-disciplinary Grid could signal a change in the way research is
done, as most research Grids are relegated to use solely by very technical
fields.
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