Supercomputer to crunch Canada’s most complex number problems
Arielle Godbout
Sun
Canada’s most powerful supercomputer – 30 times more powerful than the system used by Environment Canada to forecast the weather – will be built by IBM Canada for the University of Toronto, the two organizations are expected to announce Thursday.
The supercomputer will be capable of performing 360 trillion calculations per second and has the capacity to potentially store half a million DVDs online, said Chris Pratt, IBM Canada’s strategic initiatives executive.
In what Pratt calls an innovative move, IBM will link two different “architectures” – the overall designs of how the computer chip performs – to create a hybrid with greater flexibility. The two systems will be able to work together but also independently.
By combining the two systems, the machine will be able to cater to many different kinds of calculations, Pratt said.
The supercomputer will also allow researchers to create more complex problems to solve, said physics professor Richard Peltier, the scientific director of the University of Toronto‘s SciNet Consortium, the affiliation of research hospitals that will acquire the supercomputer.
The machine will be used by scientists in a variety of fields including aerospace, astrophysics, and chemical and planetary physics, he said.
Peltier’s own research in climate change will be greatly enhanced by the supercomputer, he said. Predicting the warming of any region involves simulations of the interaction of a number of factors including the atmosphere, the ocean and the vegetation.
“And this requires that we integrate a model of this complexity over time scales of several hundred years, beginning at the onset of the Industrial Revolution . . . up to, let’s say, 2200,” Peltier added.
Not only will the supercomputer speed up calculations that currently take weeks or even months to perform, but it will allow for greater precision, he said.
“What we want to be able to do is make predictions, for example, as to what the nature of the climate change will be that Ontario or Alberta will experience,” Peltier explained. “We want to be regionally specific.”
While Peltier said he is currently able to predict variations in the surface’s temperature at points separated by 500 kilometres, the new computer will allow the calculations to be made at points less than 100 kilometres apart.
The supercomputer, with a five-year operating budget of $50 million, is expected to be fully operational by next summer, but certain parts of the two systems may be operational as early as January.
© Canwest News Service 2008
