Canada's most powerful IBM supercomputer to analyse climate-change data at University of Toronto

16 August 2008

The University of Toronto's SciNet Consortium and IBM plan to work together to build Canada's most powerful and energy-efficient supercomputer that will process up to 360 trillion calculations per second, store 60 times more data than the Library of Congress Web archive, and be housed in an ultra energy-efficient data centre.

The system will be among the world's 20 fastest supercomputers and the largest outside the United States and used for, among other applications, analysing high-resolution global models to predict future risks, such as the accelerating decrease in Artic sea ice. 

The University of Toronto's SciNet Consortium includes the University of Toronto and associated research hospitals. The new computer will be used by SciNet to help it enhance its competitive position in globally important research projects.

These include ground-breaking research in aerospace, astrophysics, bioinformatics, chemical physics, climate change prediction, medical imaging and the global Atlas project, which is investigating the forces that govern the universe. 

Expected to be among the top 20 fastest supercomputers in the world, the machine will be 30 times faster than the peak performance of Canada's current largest research system. It also represents the second largest system ever built on a university campus, and the largest supercomputer outside the United States.

''The University of Toronto has partnered with IBM to become one of the world's premier computational research institutions – a collaboration that will attract researchers from around the world,'' said Dr. Richard Peltier, Scientific Director of SciNet and Director of the Centre for Global Change Science.