IBM supercomputer at University of Toronto

TORONTO, CANADA: IT majorIBM announced on Thursday that The University of Toronto's SciNet Consortium, Compute Canada, has completed a new supercomputer facility at SciNet.

The new supercomputer has a peak processing power of more than 300 trillion calculations per second, making it Canada's most powerful supercomputer and one of the most powerful and energy-efficient supercomputers in the world, said a press release.

The IBM Supercomputer would be used for the purpose of 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.

"With the IBM iDataPlex cluster now operational, the SciNet facility will begin delivering high performance computing services to the Canadian research community that are fully competitive with those available internationally," said Dr. Richard Peltier, scientific director of SciNet and director of the Centre for Global Change Science.

He added that this unique facility, both in terms of its compute power and its energy efficiency, represents a major success for Compute Canada, Canada's national HPC Platform and for the University of Toronto Community as a whole.

The IBM System x iDataPlex server is specifically designed for data centers that require high performance, yet are constrained by floor space, power and cooling infrastructure, said the release.

With peak performance of more than 300 trillion calculations per second, this IBM System x iDataPlex system would currently place in the top 15 of the world's most powerful supercomputers, according to the latest TOP500 List. It uses a total of 30,240 Intel processor 5500 series 2.53 GHz processor cores and it is entirely water cooled.

Chris Pratt, strategic initiatives executive, IBM Canada said, "From the outset the IBM and SciNet team knew we had to break new ground to achieve success.”

"Not only was this system the first of a kind worldwide, but we were very focused on the overall efficiency and ability to deliver meaningful research capabilities across a wide range of disciplines," he added.