Canada's Most Powerful Supercomputer to Reside in Toronto

The University of Toronto (U of T) and its SciNet Consortium of 10 affiliated research hospitals, together with IBM Canada, have announced that they will create Canada's most powerful and energy-efficient supercomputer. It will be the second-most powerful computer owned by a university anywhere and among the 20 most powerful in the world. Another perspective is that it will be 30 times more powerful than the country's current champion, the system used for Environment Canada's weather forecasting. The acquisition of the $50 million system will be financed by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Ontario government and the U of T, and the collaborators hope that the size and power of the supercomputer will give access to projects that would otherwise be unavailable to them. In a striking similarity to the need to continually upgrade household computer purchases, Dr Richard Peltier, one of the leaders of the project, noted that the new system may have a life of only five years before the hardware will have to be decommissioned and its re-usable parts salvaged. For a U of T news release, see: http://tinyurl.com/5ruxrt For an article from The Globe and Mail entitled "A HAL of a machine", visit: http://tinyurl.com/6j5f5s Summary by: The Editor