Blue Gene/Q supercomputer to serve R&D needs of Ontario SMEs

— Canada’s largest supercomputer centre, SciNet, announced will be running what is expected to be Canada’s largest computer, an IBM Blue Gene/Q, which will be able to execute almost a half quadrillion mathematical operations per second. The new supercomputer is part of the new Southern Ontario Smart Computing and Innovation Partnership (SOSCIP) with IBM, the Federal Government, Government of Ontario, the University of Toronto and six other Ontario universities.

While such heavy iron computing is typically reserved for high profile government or industrial projects, a major thrust of the SOSCIP project will be to work with Ontario small and medium-sized enterprises to speed product research and development. The new system is expected to be up and running in the Fall, with necessary upgrades to the SciNet data centre already starting.

SciNet is one of seven Compute Canada performance computing consortia across Canada, and is a local hub for technical and high-performance computing expertise. According to SciNet, the new project will increase the amount of resources available to work with Ontario’s innovative technology sector.

“We’re very excited about our role in this new project,” said Dr. Chris Loken, CTO of SciNet. “This incredible new resource, plus our existing experience in working with a wide range of clients solving their research and development computing problems, is going to enable us to help many more Ontario innovators use computing to solve their R&D problems.”
www.SciNetHPC.ca
http://computecanada.org