Researchers across Canada will soon have access to state-of-the-art high performance computing clusters at the Universities of Victoria and Calgary. The new Compute Canada systems hosted by WestGrid – and worth nearly $13 million combined – will advance research productivity and enable scientists to run sizeable and computationally intensive simulations for analysis. The new systems will be available for use starting in the spring of 2010.

For more details on the new systems' features, click here.

A Canadian software company and a leading provider of high performance nanophotonic design software, Lumerical Solutions Inc., is donating 10 simulation engine licenses of its finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) software to Compute/Calcul Canada at one of the new WestGrid installations. The licenses will enable FDTD Solutionsʼ academic customers in Canada to run, at no additional cost, large simulations on any number of the 3072 cores of WestGridʼs Orcinus cluster.cluster with Infiniband interconnect.

Information on FDTD Solutions is available at www.lumerical.com/fdtd.php, and information on how to access the software through WestGrid is available at www.westgrid.ca/support/software/lumerical.

Click here to view the full press release

The Pacific Ocean is about to flow into the Canadian Prairies.

No, it’s not a new global warming scenario. It’s a newly inked agreement that will see a duplicate set of all the scientific data being collected by the world-leading VENUS and NEPTUNE Canada ocean observatories sent to an advanced data storage system at the University of Saskatchewan (U of S).

Led by the University of Victoria (UVic), VENUS and NEPTUNE Canada are transforming the way we study the oceans. Using innovative engineering, data communication and sensor technologies, they’re gathering continuous real-time data and images from the ocean depths and relaying them to a data management and archive system at UVic.

The data storage system at the U of S is a $3.2 million investment involving the university, the province of Saskatchewan, IBM and the Canada Foundation for Innovation. It is the newest addition to an inter-institutional pool of storage and computing facilities managed by WestGrid, an organization that provides high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure to researchers across Canada as part of the national HPC platform, Compute Canada. U of S and UVic are both members of WestGrid. 

The ocean observatory data will be transmitted from Victoria to Saskatoon—at a rate as fast as one gigabit per second—on a dedicated network link provided by CANARIE, Canada’s advanced research and innovation network. 

NEPTUNE Canada is the world’s first regional cabled ocean observatory. Situated on the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate off British Columbia, it is a natural laboratory for studies on ocean change, plate tectonics, geochemistry of the ocean crust, deep sea ecosystems, and ocean engineering. Installation took place this summer; the first public data flow is expected later this fall. For more information visit www.neptunecanada.ca.

For more information click here to view the full press release.

Click here to download the entire Press Release (260 KB PDF).

1 April 2009

(Saskatoon, SK) – New data storage resources at the University of Saskatchewan (U of S) will help science, math and engineering faculty uncover more accurate results in a faster timeframe for their large-scale and data-intensive research challenges.

Installation of the new IBM storage system – a $3.2-million investment among WestGrid, the U of S, the Province of Saskatchewan, IBM and the Canada Foundation for Innovation – is the newest addition to WestGrid’s inter-institutional pool of storage and computing facilities. WestGrid is a user-driven organization that provides high-performance computing (HPC), collaboration and visualization infrastructure to researchers across Canada. The U of S is one of 14 partner institutions that support and use WestGrid resources.

“It is clear that robust, high-performing storage is something that is becoming increasingly important for many researchers,” said Raymond Spiteri, U of S professor of computer science and WestGrid’s U of S principal investigator. “There are a number of research projects across Canada, including those related to the Canadian Light Source, that can make use of large data storage.”

WestGrid users Randall Sobie (UVic) and Christopher Hearty (UBC), together with Canadian students and researchers at UBC, Victoria, McGill and Montreal, played a major role in the confirmation of the theoretical predictions made in 1972 by the 2008 Nobel laureates in Physics.

The BaBar Experiment is an international collaboration based at the Stanford Linear Accelorator Center at Stanford University with more than 550 physicists and engineers that are trying to understand why the universe is not made of equal amounts of matter and antimatter. The Nobel laureates made a bold prediction about why the universe is made of only matter. Their prediction was the motivation for the construction of the BaBar experiment. The results obtained by BaBar played a major role in the confirmation of the theoretical model.

BaBar uses the WestGrid cluster at the University of British Columbia, as well as the computing clusters funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation at the Universities of Victoria and McGill for the analysis of data and the production of simulated data.

The BaBar experiment was mentioned in the full Nobel Prize Press Release here.

 

$50 million Boost for Research in Western Canada. View full story here.

WestGrid's newest computer cluster is now open to the research community.

View full story here.

IBM invests $10 million in WestGrid computing facilities.

View full story here.

WestGrid researcher Dugan O'Neil is part of a project breaking new records in data movement. O'Neil is one of nearly 650 scientists involved with the DZero Project, an international physics collaboration between six countries.

View full story here.

Round two of WestGrid acquisitions now complete. View full story here.