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June 05, 2006
SHARCNET Launches Second Phase
The Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing Network (SHARCNET) is a consortium of 16 colleges and universities in a "cluster of clusters" of high-performance computers in south-central Ontario. Linked by advanced fiber optics, SHARCNET promotes research excellence while accelerating the production of research results -- helping researchers "beat the clock."
"Our first phase brought people and technology together and we're now beginning to see the development of some tremendously exciting projects," said Hugh Couchman, McMaster professor and SHARCNET's scientific director. "HPC of this scope provides a fundamentally different level of capacity by enabling a wide range of very complex computations across many locations tightly coupled by a dedicated, high-performance network."
SHARCNET's 10 GBps network connecting most of its partners is the first production network of this capability in Canada. Since May 2004, the number of users supported by this network has more than doubled to 1,200.
Five new partners -- including Trent, Laurentian and Lakehead universities, as well as the Ontario College of Art and Design and the Perimeter Institute -- were also introduced.
"Given their limited resources, individual universities are rarely able to assemble supercomputers of this performance," said SHARCNET board chair Ted Hewitt. "By pooling resources and strengths across the network, we are able to not only enhance collaborative research efforts, but produce tangible results at a previously impossible scale and put the province on the world map for HPC capabilities."
Funding totaling more than $100 million from the federal government, through the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), and the province, through the Ontario Innovation Trust (OIT) and Ontario Research and Development Challenge Fund (ORDCF), as well as private sector and industry contributions, has enabled the construction of SHARCNET's leading computing facilities and the recruitment of top scientists to the province. Hewlett Packard (Canada) Co. donated $2.4 million.
SHARCNET is facilitating research in a broad variety of fields, including:
- Performing simulations of HIV and immune system dynamics that will have applications in the development of new drug therapies to both treat and prevent drug resistance for devastating diseases like HIV.
- Using HPC capabilities to improve image-guided surgery and to minimize invasive animal and human testing.
- Using computational models to describe fluid flow and the migration of contaminants in ground water, which is of particular relevance following the water tragedy in Walkerton, Ontario, four years ago.
- Employing SHARCNET to study alloy microstructure and to examine how material properties can be modeled and simulated to ultimately produce stronger, yet lighter, aluminums.
- Using the network to create models that gauge temperature variations in lakes and ensuing environmental implications.
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