Backgrounder

September 22, 2006

HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING VIRTUAL LABORATORY (HPCVL)

The McGuinty government is investing $11.5 million in the High Performance Virtual Computing Laboratory (HPCVL), based out of Queen’s University.

HPCVL is a consortium of five universities and two college operating clusters of high-performance Sun Microsystems computers across Ontario.  HPCVL is the largest Sun Microsystems installation of its kind in the world.

The high-performance computing (HPC) — or supercomputing — network gives researchers in institutions across the province access to extremely powerful computers.  The network allows them to accelerate their research in a cost-effective virtual environment, and in many cases, to carry out scientific research that could not otherwise be tackled.

HPVCL's administrative offices and large central computer and storage clusters are based at Queen's University in Kingston.  Partner servers are located at Royal Military College in Kingston, at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University in Ottawa, Loyalist College in Belleville, and at Ryerson University and Seneca College in Toronto.

Partner institutions house the computer clusters and run the network, which provides high-performance computing resources to researchers across Canada.

The network has been designed, built and is run in a secure virtual manner. It is accessible from anywhere in the country and its aim is to provide researchers with the secure HPC resources they need to do innovative research that provides high return-on-capital investment for government and industry.

The network supports more than 600 researchers and expects to add 1,000 more within five years.

HPCVL facilitates research by some of Canada's pre-eminent academics in a variety of fields:

• Natalie Cann, a Queen’s University researcher working in chiral chemistry, is using HPCVL to examine how mirror image molecules, such as drugs and many other products, can appear to have identical properties but present radically different outcomes.  Cann’s research could lead to safer drugs by finding predictable ways to separate molecular twins.
• Jörg Rüdiger Sack at Carleton University uses HPCVL in his geomatics research, which involves storing and manipulating geographical or spatial data.  His goal is to develop intelligent map systems that could, for instance, deploy firefighters to the most crucial locations while monitoring victims’ vital signs.
• In the psychology department at Queen's University, Douglas Mewhort uses network resources to model word comprehension.  He is using the model to understand how we acquire language and to build commercial tools based on the model's ability to comprehend.

Ontario Research Fund (ORF)

The investment comes from the $550-million Ontario Research Fund, which provides operating, overhead and capital funding to support leading edge R&D in Ontario’s universities and hospitals, and leverages support from the federal government and private industry.

Through the Ontario Research Fund, the McGuinty government is making sure Ontario researchers have the resources to lead our province into a new era of innovation.

For more information on the Ontario Research Fund, go to www.ontario.ca/innovation.