The most powerful supercomputer in Canada

Sherbrooke, QC – According to the international ranking Top500 List of the world’s brawniest supercomputers, the Université de Sherbrooke hosts the most powerful computer in Canada, and the 41st most powerful in the world. Called “Mammouth” — French for Mammoth — it has the combined memory and speed of approximately 20,000 top-of-the-line personal computers.

Mammouth consists of a total of 39,648 AMD Opteron processor cores, 57,600 Gigabytes of RAM and 500 terabytes of data storage capacity. It can perform 240,000 billion arithmetic operations per second (240.3 Teraflops) while executing a single program.

With Mammouth, scientists from several Canadian universities perform numerical simulations essential to their research in various branches of engineering, science, medicine, and even in branches traditionally less involved in scientific computing, such as economics and linguistics.

Mammouth is funded mostly by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Quebec Ministry of Economic Development, Innovation and Export Trade. Other contributions came from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

Internationally, the top supercomputer spot went to the K Computer, installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan. It achieved an impressive 10.51 Petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores.
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