Special Edition

HPC - a search engine "for all that is unknown"

If Google is a search engine for all that is known, then high performance computing (HPC) is a search engine for all that is unknown. That's what Compute/Calcul Canada and its HPC partner SHARCNET are hoping more Canadians become aware of.

From researching the beginning of the world, to understanding climate change, to safeguarding us from pandemics, HPC and advanced networks are tools of the trade for Canadian researchers and their international collaborators.

The ORION Summit has devoted a full plenary session to the topic of this critical research infrastructure, featuring Ontario's SHARCNET distributed computing consortium, HPCVL based at Queen's University in Kingston, and SciNet at the University of Toronto.

Compute Canada, which has partnered with SHARCNET to sponsor the ORION Summit, is a national organization that coordinates and promotes the use of HPC in Canadian research, and collaborates with HPC consortia across the country in building a national high performance computing platform.

The plenary is designed to show the innovation enabled by HPC and what researchers need to know to get started.

The discussion features a who's who of HPC in Ontario, with Susan Baldwin, Executive Director, Compute/Calcul Canada, Dr. Hugh Couchman, Scientific Director of SHARCNET, and Dr. Paul Maxim, Associate Vice-President, Research and Professor of Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University and Chair of the Ontario High Performance Computing Council (OHPCC).

The session will also feature practical examples of how HPC is being used in actual research.

Tom Woo, Associate Professor and Assistant Chair, Department of Chemistry, University of Ottawa, is one of the researchers who will illustrate how his research is enabled by high performance computing, and how essential HPC has become to research and discovery. His recent work involves the capture of CO2 to mitigate green house gas emissions. Susan Brown, a digital humanist and Associate Professor in literary and theatre studies at the University of Guelph, will also be presenting her research using HPC.

Learn more at www.computecanada.org and www.sharcnet.ca.