July 2003
ORION connection helps create one of world's top supercomputers
An agreement between ORION and the Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing Network (SHARCNET) has created one of the world's most powerful supercomputers.
Announced at SHARCNET's recent Annual General Meeting in Guelph, the agreement 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.
It also represents ORION's first research project.
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 (Top500.org) to track the world's most powerful computer installations.
SHARCNET's capacity would currently be ranked among the top 60 sites in the world and represent one of Canada's most powerful HPC sites. The most recent TOP500 List was announced on June 24 during the International Supercomputer Conference in Heidelberg, showing 59 HPC systems worldwide are able to exceed the 1-teraflop mark.
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.
"This partnership is the first of many innovative research projects that ORION will now make possible throughout Ontario," said Phil Baker, President and CEO of ORANO, which owns and operates the ORION network.
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.
Leading-edge research that SHARCNET is now supporting ranges from high precision theory of fundamental atomic systems to photonics and the design and simulations of semi-conductor lasers.
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.
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