July 2004


Ontario comes through with $19.3M matching funds for SHARCNET

Ontario’s high performance computing community is ecstatic over today’s announcement that the Ontario Government has come through with $19.3 million in matching funds for a $50 million expansion of the project, giving the green light to a new consortium of 11 Ontario institutions and creating among the top 70 most powerful research facilities in the world.

Today’ announcement from the London-based Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing Network (SHARCNET), follows a previous announcement of $19 million from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI).

Providing the globally-leading optical network infrastructure that connects the computing facilities at the 11 member institutions, ORION is among the private sector and institutional partners contributing up of $10 million in in-kind and equipment support.

"This unprecedented investment clearly illustrates the importance of SHARCNET resources and services to the provincial and national research community," says Carmen Gicante, SHARCNET Executive Director. "SHARCNET is positioned to help both the province and the country become global leaders in research and innovation."

ORION President and CEO Phil Baker echoed his enthusiasm. “This is great news,” he said. “For ORION, it’s a landmark project and we are very proud to be a partner. This dramatically increases Ontario’s research capabilities and sends a powerful signal to the global high performance computing community, that Ontario is in the game.”

Supercomputing allows scientists to employ extremely powerful computers to accelerate the pace of their research in a cost-effective virtual environment and in many cases, to tackle complex scientific problems that could not otherwise be studied.

SHARCNET supports the research of some of Canada's pre-eminent academics, from strategies to combat Foot and Mouth and Mad Cow disease to new models to manage financial risk, by providing state-of-the-art HPC facilities; facilities that are hundreds or thousands of times faster than a regular desktop computer.

Put in perspective, a Canadian researcher using SHARCNET can produce results that would have normally taken a year or more on a personal computer in a single day.

SHARCNET's 11 partners comprise more than 50% of Ontario's research faculty.

SHARCNET is lead by the University of Western Ontario, and includes the Universities of Guelph, McMaster, Wilfrid Laurier, Windsor, York, Brock, Waterloo and Ontario Institute of Technology, and Fanshawe and Sheridan Colleges.

It is anticipated that once fully installed, the SHARCNET systems, housed at each of the members, will be the most powerful in Canada and that SHARCNET will have at least one system within the top 70 in the world (according Top500.org supercomputers list).

In addition, SHARCNET will have data storage facilities that are the equivalent of tens of thousands of today's top-of-the-line personal computers and provide facilities that can visualize enormous sets of data, like the formation of stars and planets.

It will also include affiliations with some of the province's leading research centres, including the Robarts Research Institute, Perimeter Institute, and Fields Institute.

"In just under four years of operation, SHARCNET has attracted a world-leading academic community," states SHARCNET Scientific Director Hugh Couchman.

"In this next evolution, SHARCNET will provide researchers with HPC facilities that are second to none in Canada and accelerate the production of results which are of benefit to our economy, health, environment, scientific knowledge and culture."

The expansion is expected to support breakthroughs in such areas as human genomics, environmental protection, financial risk management, the containment of infectious human and animal diseases, and the development nano-scale electronic devices.

SHARCNET is a key driver in the attraction of many international researchers, including myself, to Canada," confirms Dr. Hermann Eberl, a University of Guelph Professor of Mathematics and SHARCNET Chair in Bio-computing who was attracted to Guelph because of SHARCNET facilities.

"The technology and support services they provide enable scientific investigations that would otherwise be extremely difficult, even impossible in some cases."

Dr. Eberl joined the Ontario research community in 2003 from the German National Research Center for Environment and Health.

Using High Performance Computing, he studies microbial bio-processes that play a role in areas such as biological wastewater purification, the treatment of bacterial infections with antibiotics, and food safety.

Along with the 11 member institutions, private sector partners include Hewlett Packard, Platform Computing, Bell Canada, Nortel Networks, Quadrics Ltd, and the Optical Regional Advanced Network of Ontario (ORANO), which owns and operates the ORION network.

For details SHARCNET's planned expansion, visit www.sharcnet.ca.

Back to Headlines