A number of exciting research findings in fields such as astrophysics, biofuels and medicine were announced at the 2010 High Performance Computing Symposium (HPCS) held recently at the University of Toronto.

ORION sponsored this year's HPCS conference, which gathers computational researchers from all disciplines in industry and academia, computer scientists and vendors exchange new tools, techniques and interesting results in and for HPC computational research.

HPC resources help solve highly complex problems, generate new knowledge, perform business critical analyses, or run computationally intensive workloads in a scale far beyond the tasks that could be achieved on today's leading desktop systems.

ORION provides the enabling infrastructure for Ontario's HPC facilities and consortia, which includes SHARCNET, HPCVL and SciNet.

Dr. Régis Pomès and his team at the Hospital for Sick Children announced their health research findings which were enabled by the University of Toronto's SciNet. Over the past six months, the team has gained fundamental insight into the molecular mechanisms that underpin the elasticity of skin and blood vessels, the mode of action of a new Alzheimer's drug candidate, and the battle between our immune systems and the bacteria that make us sick.

"In order to study biological systems at the molecular level, we use SciNet to perform simulations on thousands of computers simultaneously," says Dr. Pomeès. "SciNet has completely changed our perspective on our own work. We are no longer making incremental progress; instead, we are implementing new approaches we weren't even dreaming of before."

Researchers at the University of Toronto, working with fuel, aerospace, and combustion experts across the world, have performed the largest- ever simulations of bio-jet-fuel combustion - making it possible now to find fuel mixtures which reduces soot formation while minimizing greenhouse gas emission. Renewable bio-fuels, made of plants which absorbed carbon dioxide as they grew, can emit significantly less net greenhouse gasses than fossil fuels; but they are more complicated chemically. Using SciNet, their results have shown how to perform new simulations in half the time, enabling more and faster exploration of burning which could change the costs of airline travel while cleaning the skies.

Another group of Toronto researchers used SciNet and knowledge from the last passage of Halley's Comet to see for the first time the magnetic fields in a cluster of galaxies. These results change our understanding of how these largest objects in the Universe evolve.

"It finally became possible to do theoretical 'experiments' - to see what would happen when a galaxy runs through the cluster, and ask if the result matches what observers see," said Dr. Jonathan Dursi, an analyst at SciNet.

Research results were also reported from researchers using SHARCNET, a distributed computing consortium based at the University of Western Ontario and involving 17 institutions throughout Ontario. Researchers from the University of Waterloo, using large-scale computing from SHARCNET, have found a new way of arranging matter - into a 'glass' that flows with perfect fluidity, and no resistance or viscosity. The group's discovery could lead to new insights regarding the formation of quantum solids.

The team used a combination of supercomputer simulations and pen-and-paper mathematics to examine a system of quantum particles. Expecting to study the interplay between quantum fluctuations and disorder, they were surprised to instead discover that the material they were studying could become freely-flowing "superglass." No such phase of material has ever been shown to be stable. The Waterloo team has shown that a superglass can also be a stable phase of matter, realized if only a few common ingredients, such as disorder and quantum fluctuations, are combined in just the correct proportions.

The breakthrough that allowed the work to proceed was the availability of massive computing resources. "This work would not have been possible even five years ago," said Roger Melko, an assistant professor in the physics and astronomy department. "Classical glass simulations are some of the most CPU intensive calculations on the planet. SHARCNET's large cluster of 3,000 processors was instrumental in obtaining these results."

The HPC Symposium is not only a forum for researchers sharing results among their colleagues, but an opportunity to raise awareness of HPC research among the general public.

"Conferences like HPCS, acting both as a way to communicate research results and as a venue to share computational techniques, are important in keeping Canada on the forefront if this scientific revolution," says Melko.

Read more about these research findings at www.hpcs2010.org/news.