Canada to get world's first supercomputer outside the U.S.

Toronto: Toronto university and the IBM have joined hands to build Canada's most powerful and energy- efficient supercomputer yet.

Capable of performing 360 trillion calculations per second, the proposed super device will give a competitive edge to Canada in global research projects, including investigation of the forces that govern the universe.

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To be among the top 20 fastest supercomputers in the world, the new device will also be 30 times faster than Canada's current largest research system. Further, it will also be the first largest supercomputer outside the US and the second largest system ever to be built on a university campus.

In a statement, the university said the supercomputer will boost research in aerospace, astrophysics, bioinformatics, chemical physics, climate change prediction, medical imaging and the global ATLAS project that probes the forces governing the universe.

It will also be one of the world's most advanced supercomputers for analyzing high-resolution global models to predict future risks, such as the accelerating decrease in Artic sea ice.

Another area of research for this system will be to explore the modern scientific mystery of why matter has mass and what constitutes the mass of the universe.

The supercomputer will be a hybrid of two IBM systems - the iDataPlex system and the advanced POWER6 architecture system.

This hybrid, whose two systems can work together or independently, will be connected to a massive five petabyte storage complex. One petabyte equals 1,024 terabytes. And one terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes.
Source: IANS