2006 ORION Award Discovery Award of Merit Winner

Professor Robert S. Orr and the ATLAS Canada Group

Prof. Pierre Savard of the University of Toronto accepts the 2006 ORION Discovery Award of Merit on behalf of Prof. Robert S. Orr and the ATLAS Canada Group, at the 2006 ORION Award presentations in Toronto June 5, 2006.


Prof. Robert S. Orr

Scientists have been studying matter for centuries, trying to understand its behavior. Now, experimental high-energy particle physics is about to enter an extremely exciting period. Workers in this area are on the cusp of solving the problems of the basic structure of matter and the riddle of the composition of dark matter with a supersymmetric theory that unlocks the mystery.

As part of an international project to search for the origin of mass in the universe, a group at the University of Toronto, led by physicist Prof. Robert S. Orr, NSERC Principal Investigator for ATLAS Canada, is making use of interconnected high-performance computers and high-speed networking using the ORION network to collaborate with researchers across Canada.

Contributing to the world’s largest scientific experiment involving the Large Hadron Collider facilities at CERN in Switzerland, the ATLAS Canada collaboration includes engineers, research associates, technicians and students. With a group of 88 people, including five institute of particle physics research scientists, 33 NSERC grant-eligible scientists and the recent addition of 13 research associates, 21 graduate students (a number which is expected to double in the next five years) and 20 undergraduate summer students, ATLAS plays a strong educational role in Canada. This team represents a number of institutions including University of Alberta, Carleton, McGill, Université de Montréal, Simon Fraser, University of Toronto, TRIUMF (Canada’s National Particle Physics Lab), University of British Columbia, University of Victoria and York University.

High-speed networking enabled by ORION plays a crucial role by linking the Toronto site to the rest of Canada and to international collaborators throughout the world.

The project, involving experiments in particle physics, makes use of ORION and Canada’s CA*net 4 research and education networks to establish a powerful grid computing facility, enabling global-scale research collaborations among researchers in the ATLAS Canada Group, linking computing centres at several Canadian universities to a large system at TRIUMF, Canada's National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics in Vancouver.

With a total of 1,800 scientists, engineers and technicians in several countries, the project represents a critical contribution from Ontario and Canada to this historic international scientific research collaboration.

For more information on the ATLAS Canada Group, visit their Web site at: http://atlas-canada.web.cern.ch/atlas-canada .

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