CBC News article on SciNet

Thursday, June 18, 2009:
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/06/18/tech-090618-ibm-supercomputer-scinet-toronto.html

Toronto team completes Canada’s most powerful supercomputer
A supercomputer that can complete more than 300 trillion calculations per second — the most powerful in Canada — has been completed at the University of Toronto’s SciNet facility.

The IBM iDataPlex cluster computer would be one of the top 15 most powerful supercomputers in the world, based on the online Top 500 list, said a release Thursday announcing the supercomputer’s completion.

The project was a collaboration between SciNet, IBM Corp. and Compute Canada, an umbrella group that represents academic high-performance computing groups across the country.

Researchers hope to use the machine’s vast computing power to:

• Analyze data from the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.
• Analyze high-resolution climate change models, including ones that predict the decrease in Arctic sea ice and regional climate change predictions from Ontario and the Great Lakes watershed region.
• Conduct research on aerospace, astrophycis, bioinformatics, chemical physics, medical imaging, and the ATLAS research project on forces that govern the universe.

The cluster uses 30,240 Intel processor 5500 series 2.53 GHz processor cores and is cooled using water.