Press Releases

Principal Investigators (PIs) at Canadian academic institutions who require access to more than the default allocation of 10 Core Years on Compute Canada’s large shared memory system, Hungabee, are invited to submit proposals requesting allocations of CPU time to Compute Canada.

In addition to offering access to Hungabee with 2048 cores and 16 TB of shared memory, Compute Canada offers applications-enabling assistance from HPC experts at the regional consortia.

The deadline for submitting applications is April 16, 2012 at 3pm EDT. More info

Principal Investigators (PIs) in the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences at Canadian academic institutions who require access to High Performance Computing (HPC) resources on Compute Canada systems are hereby invited to submit proposals requesting allocations of CPU time and storage to the Compute Canada National Resource Allocation Committee (NRAC). Please note that Compute Canada does not charge any access fee for use of the resources nor is there a fee for user support. These resources may be accessed independent of the location of the equipment or the researcher thanks to CANARIE’s national high performance network and the provincial ORANs.

The intent of this program is to permit access to a level of computational resources that would be hard to achieve through informal access to shared resources. For more modest requirements or testing purposes, access is available immediately to most systems and certainly to the SuperMicro system.

The deadline for submitting applications is April 24, 2012 at 3pm EDT. More info

(February 23, 2012 – Ottawa) – Compute Canada, Canada’s national platform of High Performance Computing (HPC) resources and partners, today announced grants of nearly $80 million worth of state-of-the-art computing, storage, and support resources allocated to 159 leading edge Canadian research projects across the country.

Compute Canada’s distributed resources represent close to two petaFLOPs of compute power, which is equal to two quadrillion calculations per second, and more than 20 petabytes of storage, equivalent to more than 400 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text. These competitively-awarded grants will allocate nearly 725 million processor-hours and eight petabytes of storage to the projects over the next year. Researchers will also have direct access to more than 40 Compute Canada programming and technical experts who are critical to enabling the efficient use of these state-of-the-art HPC systems.

“The scope and scale of today’s research investigations demand an incredible amount of computational power,” said Compute Canada Executive Director, Susan Baldwin. “Compute Canada responds to that need by delivering the essential tools and resources Canadian researchers need to respond to today’s big data challenges, propel ground-breaking discoveries, and develop new industrial applications or commercial opportunities.”

Each year Compute Canada accepts requests from researchers across the country whose projects require cutting-edge computing resources, storage, and expertise. The projects – which range from aerospace design and climate modeling to medical imaging and nanotechnology -- produce results and breakthroughs that in many cases simply wouldn’t be possible without Compute Canada’s resources.

“I’ve always been a champion of HPC because it enables us to perform the kind of complex, large-scale calculations that are essential for verifying our ideas and uncovering new findings,” says André Bandrauk, a University of Sherbrooke Professor of Theoretical Chemistry and Canada Research Chair in Computational Chemistry & Molecular Photonics. “These resources are critical for driving advancements in Canadian research as well as enabling Canadian researchers to compete on the international stage.”

The partner institutions and resource centres that comprise Compute Canada are hubs of interdisciplinary computational research, connected from coast to coast by the high-speed national CANARIE network and regional advanced networks. Together, these distributed computing facilities work collaboratively to provide the expertise and resources necessary to give Canada’s researchers and innovators access to these world-class technologies.

Compute Canada’s resources are granted based on scientific merit and computational need. In addition to the competitively-allocated grants for above-average computing requirements, all Canadian researchers have access to significant default allocations of computational resources and support expertise. For more information on Compute Canada, its regional consortia, and its distributed resources, visit the Compute Canada website: www.computecanada.org. More info

WATERLOO, Ont. (Friday, Jan. 13, 2012) – A three-member international team of theoretical physicists, including a University of Waterloo professor, made a notable discovery about the unusual behaviour of electrons, with implications for all of physics. Their findings appear today in Science, one of the world’s pre-eminent journals for original, peer-reviewed scientific research.

This work is a significant step in allowing physicists the rare opportunity to study seemingly impossible fractional particles. The research team includes professor Roger G. Melko of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Waterloo, professor Matthew Hastings of the Department of Physics at Duke University in Durham, N.C. and also of Microsoft Research at the University of California, and lead author Sergei Isakov, a post-doctoral research associate with the Institut fur Theoretische Physik in Zurich, Switzerland. They used the computer power and capacity that Compute Canada’s Ontario-based supercomputing consortium SHARCNET provides to produce a simulation study that uncovered significant information about fractional particles when cooled to near absolute zero.

The researchers successfully created a simulated crystal of quantum material, which had just the right properties to be tuned to an unusual quantum state near absolute zero. When a particle with the fundamental electron charge was placed in that state, the team observed it fractionalize – or split itself – into two separate objects, each with a charge of half an electron. The researchers were then able to measure several values relating to the motion of the fractional particle. These numbers are universal, and so physicists can apply them across other areas of physics.

“What we have shown is not just that fractional particles can be created in a computer, but that they can affect universality at a phase transition. That means certainproperties transcend the specifics of the system, in our case the simulatedmaterial,” said Melko. “These properties will be present in other systems – physical, chemical, biological – that contain the same type of fractional particle. Thus, our work can be used to guide future studies looking for these odd half-electrons across a variety of disciplines.”

Rather than study high-energy systems, the team took advantage of the fact that low-temperature matter can come together to exhibit remarkable collective behaviour as quasiparticles. The motion of these cooperating particles, when viewed from a distance, is essentially indistinguishable from that of a regular, free particle. And, as they demonstrated in this paper, under just the right conditions, these quasiparticles can contain a fraction of the fundamental electron charge.

“The potential impact of our work is still unknown. The discovery of fractionalization in the quantum Hall effect revolutionized the way we think of matter. It won a Nobel Prize, and we are still building on this success,” said Melko. “Understanding these fractional particles could influence our understanding of superconductivity, help us build better electronics, and even play a part in the design of quantum computers in the future.”

The researchers’ article entitled “Universal Signatures of Fractionalized Quantum Critical Points” follows the team’s paper published last fall in the respected journal Nature Physics. That paper, which initially uncovered evidence for the existence of fractional particles in this low-temperature phase of matter was the result of months of collaboration and computer simulation work.

SHARCNET is pleased to announce the results of its Round III Dedicated Programming Support competition. See award details for more information.

Congratulations to all the awardees!